Field Day 6

As you can see, today was a busy day at the site. We had our usual Saturday team, which is bigger than our weekday team, plus Harry, the town historian, brought by a group of people who had just listened to his lecture on Rochambeau. It was really fun to show the visitors the site, tell its history, and share our finds. Speaking of finds, remember that piece of maybe-flint? It is flint, and specifically gun flint. It is our first direct archaeological evidence of the military presence at St. George's.

Because of the large number of people, we were able to have three units going simultaneously throughout the morning. Above, you can see father and son team Scott and James working on the expanded STP 3. Carol made the very prudent suggestion that we excavate the unit northwest to the original STP 3 in order to gain profile views of all four units.

 
Dene, Scott, and James opened what we have called STP 3B. Our intention in expanding STP 3 was to discover whether what we believed was a foundation wall continued outside of the unit. As it turns out, it does. The photograph below shows it very nicely.


Like STP 3, STP 3B has yielded a lot of artifacts. (It has come to be known as the "Party Unit." Maybe only by me.) Much of these artifacts have been architectural, although we found one piece of ceramic. I have been surprised by how little ceramic we have found on the site. When I excavated in upstate New York, our units were swimming in ceramic. But that site was domestic (rather than religious), Seneca Iroquois (rather than European), and dated from the 1680s-1710s (rather than the 1760s-1910s).

Above you can see a possible architectural artifact - possibly a piece of molded cement, or rock. I am not very good at telling the difference, but it seems very likely that this was part of St. Mark's Church. You can also see my recording form in the picture. All of the forms for our dig were very kindly supplied by my former professor at Cornell.

At the same time that we were beginning STP 3B, we also continued to excavate the possible dry well, a.k.a. Feature 1 (above). The amount of NAILS we have found in this unit has been tremendous. Also significant is the number of pieces of patterned glass, shown in my last post. Today Carol suggested that this glass may have been painted. It will have to be cleaned very carefully. Most people associate archaeology with digging, when it is at least equal parts planning, recording, organizing, cleaning, analyzing, writing, etc.


Above you can see Sally screening the artifacts from STP 1, the third unit that we worked on today. We believe we are near the end of STP 1, as we have reached a consistent layer of light alluvial soil that is seemingly devoid of artifacts.

But what about artifacts? Where do they go? For the moment, they go into bags, and the bags go into a box, and the box goes to my house. I have to hide the box to keep my cats from sleeping in it. It's very high-tech stuff.

Eventually, the artifacts will be transported back to the headquarters of the local chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association. They will need to be cleaned and stabilized - that is, adjusted to a condition in which they will not rapidly deteriorate. Ultimately, the artifacts may stay housed at NYSAA, or some may go to a local museum or historical society.


Before that happens, however, some of the more interesting artifacts will probably be shown to the public, which is what happened today. We were very proud to show our gun flint to the visitors who stopped by with Harry. Above, you can see a group of excavators and visitors listening to Jean from the American Society of Le Souvenir Français, Inc. Although we have no direct evidence, it seems quite possible that French soldiers from Rochambeau's army are buried at the cemetery, given their presence in the area.

Edited to add: Thanks to Hans for cleaning up the cemetery while we worked. He removed the low-hanging branches that blocked our view of the site in this photo, and moved the footstones that had been arranged across the St. Mark's site to the side of the cemetery.