Posted on 1 Comment on Artifact of the Day – May 2nd 2024 – Marine Bivalve Shell

Artifact of the Day – May 2nd 2024 – Marine Bivalve Shell

I wasn’t expecting us to have an artifact of the day so early in the excavation, especially since most of the planned excavation work today was digging through already excavated material. While the fill used to level and cap the site after our 2018 excavations has a lot of modern artifacts mixed in like plastic bags, cutlery, straws and the like which I suppose will be future artifacts to someone, they are not yet of archaeological concern!

The crew re-locating the northeast corner of Structure 1 had part of their unit fall in previously unexcavated soil, and as they were cleaning it back, out popped a shell. And not the typical land snail shells we see, or maybe perhaps a freshwater mussel shell or even an oyster shell, but part of a marine shell!

I chose this as artifact of the day because it reminded me of the other shell we found in 2017 on this site. Finding two marine shells is pretty suggestive of someone living here being into Conchology, which was an extremely popular Victorian pastime.

While the collecting and study of shells has been popular for hundreds of years, the term Conchology was coined by the British naturalist Emanuel Mendes da Costa, who published Elements of Conchology in 1776.

Unlike our previous shell find, this one is a bivalve. My initial brief foray into the literature suggests it is a member of the Veneridae family, but maybe after cleaning it up and looking for diagnostic features we will be able to narrow it down to a particular species. We will never know if this was brought back as a momento by a family member or friend who travelled the oceans, or was special ordered from a shell merchant to add to a cabinet of curiosities, but it gives us another little peek into the life of one of the past inhabitants of this house.

Posted on No Comments on A return to Structure 1!

A return to Structure 1!

Yesterday we split our crew into two, and over the course of the day each group got to spend half the day rambling across campus with James visiting various points of interest, and half the day immersed in a crash course of historical ceramics and glass delivered by yours truly. This was our last main session of classroom instruction before heading into the field for the remainder of the course.

This morning we met at Blackburn Hall, and unloaded the equipment trailer to the site. The plan for today was to put in some targeted excavation units to relocate the corners of Structure 1, so we can place the excavation areas we want to focus on in the next week or two.

The site looks a bit different since we were last there in 2018! Fill has been added to level the ground surface over the structure, and some of the trees remaining from the copse being cut down have subsequently also been removed. Unfortunately our datum had also been removed during the course of landscaping activities, hence our alternative method of re-locating diagnostic points of the structure to use as controls.

We laid down some tarps and laid in some units and got to work! One of James’s graduate students, Ana Aristizabal Henao is with us for a few days and is helping oversee some of the excavation areas.

Here are some candid shots from the day:

We were also joined by another of James’s MA students, Grant Ginson. He and James taught survey instrumentation to some of our crew while excavations continued. This will continue over the course of the field school, with our students rotating through various tasks including survey, mapping, excavation, and artifact processing.

By lunch time, everyone was ready for a break!

Activities after lunch included setting up the construction fencing we had delivered to site, extending our exploratory units where necessary to try and relocate features, and putting in some additional units to chase the wall alignments to make sure we were on the right track.

By the end of the day, we had achieved one of our goals, to relocate the NE corner of the structure. All that hard work to excavate, only to start backfilling once we placed a new temporary datum!

It was a beautiful day, and our group is really starting to come together. Tomorrow we will continue the relocation units and exploratory units, and hopefully have our excavation plan decided so we can really get into things on Monday.