While I've been at school, the dig team led by Laurie has been hard at work at the site. She gave me the following photos and information to report from the field days on Monday the 6th and Sunday the 12th. The 6th was Bruce's birthday (and also my dad's - weird), so he had the honor of choosing the location for the next test unit. The team dug a small STP in this location to see what would emerge, and immediately found this padlock:
Thinking that this could very well be a productive location, the team drew out a larger unit here - between two trees and up against the southern wall of the cemetery.
As the team dug and screened for artifacts, Gretchen bagged their finds. Having bagged a lot of artifacts myself - most of them in this portion of the cemetery - I can say that it can be a challenge to keep up with the volume of artifacts being produced from the ground. In addition to documenting the provenance of the artifacts on every bag, we make a preliminary attempt to sort the artifacts as they are bagged - i.e., creating a bag for ceramics, one for glass, one for metal, etc.
Below is some of the glass the team found in this location. The glass bottles pictured at the top of this post, with the exception of the perfume bottle, were found here as well. The C. N. West Disinfectant bottle (second from the right) is actually identical to one that I found in my backyard a few years ago and dates from the early to mid-20th century. Laurie found the heart-shaped perfume bottle while poking around in the wall behind the excavation unit.
After the Saturday dig date was canceled due to rain, Laurie and Bruce went back to the site on Sunday to dig another spot in the dump, a short distance from our original STP last year. Here is a selection of their finds ...
A mason jar lid (made with printed "milk glass"), a pipe stem, and some nails (one of which looks hand-wrought though it's hard to tell from the picture and with all of the corrosion):
A medicine bottle, two more pipe stems, and the base of a glass bottle ... also what looks to be either a hook or a trammel (the metal object).
This "button" that turned out to be the label clip for a bottle of rum:
An actual button, and this strange arrow-shaped glass object that Laurie suggested could have been part of a chandelier. Any ideas?
Also, more shoe parts:
Again, the team observed the same pattern of artifact distribution, with most of the artifacts concentrated between 6 and 12 inches below the surface. For the most part, older artifacts seem to occupy the same layers as newer ones, and the majority of artifacts seem to be domestic.
Hi, Maddie. I've missed you. Can't say I'm necessarily 'back' yet, but you were the first person I looked for when I managed to slip out of the Mines of Moria for a little while.
ReplyDeleteSo anyway, I suggest the glass arrowhead should be seen as a kind of ink blot test. The first thing I thought of when I saw it was a planchette for a ouija board. The second thing was a Christmas tree. And then it occurred to me that it has a shaft just like a real arrow or spear head, which led to some fanciful notions quite uncharacteristic of me. I think Laurie is probably better balanced and therefore more to be relied on.