Field Day 8

Doesn't this look like modern art? It's actually STP 4 with the sod layer stripped off. We managed to keep it all in one piece! Here's how it looked in progress. When we close the unit, all of the dirt will be shoveled back into the hole and the sod layer will be put back in its original position.

STP 4, given all our expectations for it, has turned out to be somewhat of a disappointing unit, producing lots of hard, compacted, dry soil and only a few (modern) artifacts. I think that most of it may be fill, at least in the top three levels. Below is the most interesting (but still modern) artifact we found in STP 4 - a bullet shell.


As you'll be able to see in some of these photos, it was raining for part of the time we were in the field, which was a little annoying but didn't really get in the way of our work. It's not a great idea to dig when it's pouring but a little drizzle can actually make the soil colors show better. My biggest concern was keeping the records dry.

 

More work on STP 4. That old carton is used to shovel dirt into the screen. You can see above how close we are to the road, which may explain why we encountered fill in STP 4. The fill could also come from the little garden that surrounds the flagpole.

 

This photo shows how we dig. Digging seems like it would be self-explanatory, but it's not. It's best to dig with your trowel parallel to the ground and to sweep the dirt towards you. The key is to remove small amounts of dirt in a systematic fashion, keeping the entire surface of the unit as even as you can all the time. To keep things even, you shouldn't pull out roots or stones or excavate down under an artifact - instead, excavate around these things until they can be removed neatly.

While STP 4 was being opened, STP 2 was being closed. In the photo above you can see the light-colored soil at the bottom of the unit that can indicate that you have reached the end of the organic layers that might have cultural material. Like STP 1, we dug STP 2 until we had completed two consecutive 4 inch-thick layers that had no artifacts in them. This brought us down to 20 inches below the datum.

As we were packing up for the day (a little earlier than usual due to the rain), Laurie made an interesting suggestion. What if the eighteenth-century St. George's Church was not located directly to the east of St. Mark's Church, as we believed, but in an open area slightly to the south? She pointed out that all of the eighteenth-century sandstones in the cemetery are on the periphery of this open area.

Though we have maps of the area from the time St. George's is standing, none of them is precise enough to pinpoint the exact location of the church within the cemetery. The maps that do show the church's exact location all date from long after the church was torn down.

It may be worth it to look over all of the evidence again, however, and so I'm going to review all the references we have to the location of St. George's and see if we can figure it out.