Field Day 23

This is how we spent the morning - backfilling trenches lined with plastic wrap. Why? Because when we got to the site, the tarps over the trenches looked like this ----->

Ice! The cold season has officially arrived. But why plastic wrap? We wrapped Features 1 and STP 3/Feature 4 in order to return to them next season. Feature 4, when filled in, looked creepily like a grave. I hope no one calls the police on us again.

This is what STP 3/Feature 4 looked like before we filled it in. We think this may be the corner of a foundation wall. Where we had thought it might continue, it turns abruptly and disappears outside of the unit - how sneaky! But it works out just fine for us, because a corner gives us more information on the location of the church than a random section of wall.

And here's Bruce, Bill, and I convened in Feature 1 before we filled it in. We were discussing the artifacts found beneath those big boulders I'm sitting on and how they might have got there. Did the artifacts slip under the boulders, or did the boulders fall on them (perhaps when a church wall collapsed)? Bill and Bruce think that the boulders are part of a foundation wall.



While all of this was going on, Bruce and Angelika were busy metal detectoring along the southern wall of the cemetery. They made some great finds, including pieces of what seem to be a lead box, a sleigh bell, and an Indian head penny from 1887. But perhaps the most exciting find was this, found by Bruce:



We knew that it was a King George coin, but which George? After doing some research, my dad and I have come to the conclusion that it was George II (shown below). This was the only coin with both a left-facing bust on the obverse and a left-facing Britannia on the reverse (Georges I and III face right). As for the date, I looked at it very closely when I got home and thought I saw the year 1727, but my dad couldn't see it. (The details on the obverse of the coin are actually much clearer in the photograph above, which I didn't see until later, than they are in real life. Looking at it now, I can see the number "II" and the word "REX" on it).

While he was digging at a different spot, Bruce came across this gorgeous spout from an earthenware teapot. Impressed by this find, Laurie decided to dig a little more to see if she could find the rest of the teapot. What she found were several more pieces ... and a privy.

Yes, a PRIVY. One generation's toilet is another generation's archaeological treasure trove. Why? Because in addition to what you'd expect people to find in a toilet, you can find bottles, jars, pots, nails, metal objects, combs, eyeglasses, buttons, teacups, pipes, animal bones, shoes, and whatever else people felt like dumping in there because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was no trash collection service.

And so, for the next million hours that came after we backfilled Features 1 and 4, we dug the privy. We didn't have to dig very far - about twelve inches - before we had uncovered so many artifacts that I had to stop and just organize them for an hour. We were in awe of what we found. Just look at Tricia and Gretchen in the photo below - can't you see the awe?

The photo below shows a mere SAMPLE of what we found. Ultimately, the finds from Level 1 filled five medium-sized boxes. The most significant categories were ceramic, glass, metal, and bone/shell. The volume of ceramic sherds was most surprising to me considering that we have found so little ceramic in the other parts of the site we dug this season. Well, I guess I found where it was hiding.

Left: Another piece of the teapot (we found about four pieces of it so far). Right: The rim of a ceramic basin.


Left: An eyeglass lens (from the optical factory?). Right: What we think is the base of a lamp.


Left: A maker's mark on an earthenware sherd. I'm not a ceramics expert, but this thing is OLD AS DIRT. Right: Pieces of a glass bottle that Laurie identified as "The Great Universal Stomach Bitters," c. 1870s-1880s. You can see a photo of an intact bottle here.

Here are some more ceramic pieces with printed designs. The largest piece was manufactured by the East Trenton Pottery Co. in Trenton, New Jersey, in the late 1880s.


There's more that we didn't even get a chance to take pictures of, but I think you get the general idea. As for how we were able to tell we found a privy - the large amount of artifacts was a clue, particularly the number of oyster and clam shells (which were used to kill the smell in privies). As we dug deeper, we realized that the hole we had found was lined with stones. I also realized that I will be processing artifacts ALL winter ... which actually sounds pretty wonderful.