Field Days 1 and 2

The excavation of the St. George's/St. Mark's Church site began its 2014 season on Friday. For those of you who didn't follow this blog last year, or who would like to review what we did, you can read through my posts from 2013. To recap briefly: Our site was the location of two churches, St. George's (1762-1819) and St. Mark's (1851-1916). The former was the first public building in the town of North Castle, New York, which was settled by Quakers in the 1720s; a significant portion of the population was converted to Anglicism by missionaries in the intervening years. Though the foundation of St. George's Church marked a significant development in the settlement of this area of Westchester County, North Castle was still considered a "wilderness" by the Anglican establishment for much of its history preceding Independence. The site played a notable role in the Revolutionary War, serving as an arsenal and hospital for Washington's troops following the Battle of White Plains in October 1776 and a camp site for Count Rochambeau's army in summer 1781.

After the Revolution, St. George's became part of the Episcopal church (i.e., it separated from the Church of England, along with all other Anglican churches in the United States). However, the building wasn't used for services after the war, and it was ultimately disassembled. Thirty years passed between the removal of old St. George's and the construction of St. Mark's, its replacement. This church then stood until 1916, when it was replaced by a stone building in a different location.

The churchyard contains burials dating back to 1773 (some burials may be earlier, but they are not dated). Today the property belongs to the town, having been relinquished by the Episcopal church and by the Methodist church (which purchased the adjoining land in 1854 for its own cemetery, which was used until 1940). In the summer of 2013, our group, the Lower Hudson Chapter NYSAA, obtained permission from the town to conduct an archaeological excavation of the site with the goal of learning more about the use of the two churches and how they related to one another, both spatially and conceptually. For instance, how might the cultural memory of St. George's Church, projected across thirty years' absence, have affected the placement, design, and identity of St. Mark's Church in the early 1850s?

The key to answering this question lies in uncovering the location of the two churches in the site as well as relative to one another. While St. Mark's Church can be located with relative accuracy from photographs, no illustration of St. George's Church exists, and the descriptions and maps we have locate it only very generally within the site. You can imagine our delight, therefore, when we discovered what appears to be an 18th-century foundation wall in our excavation last year. Embedded in and around the wall were square nails, earthenware pottery sherds, slate tiles, and a few stand-out artifacts including a French gunflint and a stone pestle.

One of our goals in resuming the excavation this fall was to continue our excavation of this foundation wall. Last winter, we covered the unit (known in its early incarnation as STP 3 and later as Feature 4) with heavy plastic before backfilling it and marking the area with stones. Field Season 2014 began with the arduous task of removing the dirt and plastic. While the stones seemed like a good idea at the time, we quickly discovered that they make this process more difficult, as the grass had grown up over them over the past year, rendering them invisible. Still, the team managed to remove the dirt and reestablish the unit quickly and efficiently.

With the unit uncovered, we decided to go ahead and double the area that was exposed. That is, we matched the four-by-eight foot unit excavated last year with another four-by-eight foot unit directly to the west of it. We hoped by doing so to uncover more of the foundation wall, and sure enough, within about six inches from the surface, we started to find more stones, arranged in the same manner, and with the same type of inclusions, as the wall excavated last year. These inclusions included architectural debris (mostly slate tiles and nails; interestingly, one of the slate tiles had a square hole drilled in it, the first such example we have found) and more "fancy glass" (i.e. the stencil-painted glass we found last year and have since associated with St. Mark's Church).

The most exciting find we made in this unit (which I have named Feature 4B, as opposed to Feature 4A excavated last year) is a large amount of earthenware pottery, concentrated in the northeast quadrant of the unit where the foundation wall extends from 4A into 4B. This pottery has a reddish tint to it and is decorated with grooves and circles. I believe we found a small piece of it in Feature 4A last year, but a more formal comparison awaits. Some of the pieces seem to have a shiny reddish slip on them, while others show traces of an unidentified white substance. The pieces are large enough and numerous enough to make identification relatively easy. We should be able to determine what type of vessel it was, how it was used, and when it was created. This find is particularly exciting given the fact that we have found relatively little ceramic material in this area of the site, where the two churches were; in contrast, we have found a large amount of ceramic sherds in the back portion of the cemetery.

At the same time as this work on the foundation wall was going on, overseen by Laurie, we were also exploring this back area that we identified last year as "the dump." Why the dump? Because the nature, arrangement, and sheer volume of artifacts we have found in that location makes that the most reasonable interpretation (initially, we thought it was a privy, but the diffusion of artifacts - they were spread out evenly over a wide area rather than being concentrated in a feature with discernible walls - makes that less likely). The majority of the artifacts we uncovered last year came from the dump, despite the fact that we only excavated it for three days out of the 24 we spent on the site last season.

On field day 1, we opened a small (2 by 2 foot) unit adjacent to the STP (shovel test pit) we dug last season. The next day, we decided to open up a larger (3 by 5 foot) unit directly southwest of this unit, in order to gain access to a larger section of this area. We would continue to dig the smaller unit (Feature 6) in order to observe the stratigraphy in a more controlled manner, while the larger unit (Feature 7) would allow us to uncover a greater number of artifacts and to view their distribution across a wider area.

In excavating Feature 6, we used a small, hand-held screen to sieve for artifacts. Margaret is shown above doing this patient and painstaking work, in which she uncovered bottle glass, nails, and ceramic sherds with little noticeable change in the soil texture, consistency, or color. The soil in this area of the site is uniformly dry and powdery, very different from the rich, grass-covered soil in the front of the site. 

When dealing with a larger volume of artifacts, as we have in Feature 4B and Feature 7, a shaker screen comes in handy. This beautiful new screen was donated to the group by Tricia and is being used for the first time this season. These are some of the artifacts uncovered in the screen in Feature 7: nails, ceramic sherds, glass, oyster and clam shells, animal bones, and brick. Not pictured: a 1975 penny, the base of a gas lamp, two clay pipe stems, and a clay pipe bowl.

As you can see in this profile view of the southwestern corner of Feature 7, the dark soil - in which we found the majority of artifacts - extends about 10-12 inches below the datum. After that point, as the soil starts to change to a lighter color, the number of artifacts begins to diminish, and eventually disappear altogether. This is similar to what we have seen in the units in the front portion of the site, although those units tend to show a much more stratified stratigraphy - that is, there is more noticeable variation in soil color and texture between the turf layer and the sterile soil. This suggests a difference in the way the two areas were used, which was what we would expect if the front half of the site was occupied by the churches - with all the activities, construction, and deconstruction that entailed - and the back half was simply a dump where people threw their refuse indiscriminately.

Next week, we will continue to dig Features 4 and 6 and possibly open up additional units in the dump site. Bruce, who did most of the digging of Feature 7, stated that he thought the most artifacts were coming from the southern portion of the unit. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. Ultimately, using our data from the individual units, we should be able to map out the distribution of artifacts across the dump site to see if there are any other patterns in the number or type of artifacts. So far, it seems that earlier artifacts and newer ones are jumbled together, with no recognizable chronological pattern from layer to layer. This may change as we open new units, which could be more noticeably stratified. This stratification could potentially help us determine how long this area has been used as a dump and how its use has changed over that time.