Field Day 2

As Day 1 was spent on the not very rewarding (but extremely important) work of laying out our baselines, we didn't get to break the dirt at all until Day 2. Above, you can see one of the three shovel test pits (STPs) we planned out at 20 feet intervals, five feet off of the EW baseline. 

Below, Pat, Dene, and I are positioning the stakes using triangulation. I am convinced this is the hardest part.

While we were working on the STPs, John took some measurements around the church site with a corer. The corer can be used to find obstructions beneath the surface that may indicate a feature, a foundation wall, or (in our case) a buried gravestone. After comparing old photographs of the cemetery (taken around the 1890s) to its appearance today, Susan noted that many of the stones have gone missing; it's possible that they fell where they stood and were buried.

Back to the STPs. Pat, Claudia, and I excavated STP 1. As expected, the first two levels (including the topsoil) revealed hardly any finds at all. At the end of Level 2, however, we started to find large amounts of pea gravel that seemed to suggest we had hit the long path that once extended from the entrance of the cemetery to the nineteenth-century St. Mark's Church. This gravel was also found in STP 2.

Here, we use a Munsell Color Book to categorize the color of the soil we unearthed from Level 1. As an excavator, it is important to become familiar with the appearance and texture of soil as it will allow you to discern subtle changes that distinguish different strata or that may indicate a feature or some sort of disturbance caused by human action. Identification of the different strata (or layers) in an excavation - known as stratigraphy - is essential to understanding the chronology of the site and placing the artifacts and features in context.

Below you can see Claudia, Pat, and I working on STP 1 while Dene brings over a bucket of dirt from STP 2. All of the dirt was sifted through a quarter inch mesh shaker screen. In addition to the gravel, we found several small finds (in our unit, they were mostly from level 3), including pieces of glass and coal and one square nail (pictured below). STPs are great for obtaining a "snapshot" of the site underground. Since you can't dig the whole site (usually), and you don't want to dig randomly, you can use STPs to decide what areas are worth excavating.

Below you can see the aforementioned nail. It was a very exciting find! Our plans for Day 3 include completing our existing STPs and opening new ones and perhaps beginning the excavation of a possible dry well in between the St. George's and St. Mark's Church sites (I will try to get a map in here of some kind so that you can see how the two sites relate to one another).