Field Day 21

Whew, it was cold today. The temperature isn't really that low (about 45 degrees F), but over the course of hours it makes it very difficult to use your hands properly. You can tell how cold it was based on my handwriting on the forms and bags - and by the bags, which seem to rip easier when they're cold.

Still, we got a lot done, finishing Level 2 of Feature 4 and uncovering a few nails and a huge amount of painted plaster from the northwest corner of Feature 1 - shown below. The colors of the paint so far have been pink, blue, black, gray, and red.  I am starting to imagine a whole landscape painted across the church walls! (But which church? That is the question.)


Feature 4 produced the same sorts of artifacts we have already found in the unit: nails, pottery, glass, slate, coal, and mortar. The northwest quadrant of the unit continues to show signs that the wall from STP 3 extends beneath it. We shall see!

Meanwhile, history enthusiast and former local resident Bruce did some work with his metal detector around the cemetery. In case you're wondering, all the finds our metal detectorists make are bagged and labeled with the find location and date.

Finds like this shoe buckle, for instance, which is made of bronze and probably dates to the Colonial Era. It was three inches below the surface of the ground. Bruce also found several square nails.

The surface surveying team, represented today by J, also made some impressive finds. Below, we are organizing them in order to take photographs. Again, there was a good mixture of material from the mid-nineteenth all the way up to the twenty-first century.

With Field Day 21, we have now been excavating the equivalent of three whole weeks! Or the equivalent of four five-day weeks plus one day. We now have a whole new understanding of the site, a million new questions, and I have a new respect for people who work outside in the cold. It's not easy - and it isn't even that cold yet!

Next week, depending on the weather, we may close up the site for the season and begin cleaning, writing, and artifact processing. Once the trenches close, the real work begins.