We were lucky to fit in a couple of hours of excavation today before the threatening rain started pelting down!
Xander, Teagan and Emma in the second midden unitas the deluge started
Everyone hurriedly finishing their screening so we can pack up and get out of there!
Mason, Jax, Esther and Caroline aren’t afraid of a little rain.
We quickly packed up the site and got the equipment back to the trailer and then broke for lunch. After lunch we decided to take the opportunity to start processing the artifacts we have been collecting in our Archaeology Centre wet lab.
It’s always really exciting to see the nice clean artifacts emerge from the adhering dirt, and also start to see if there are patterns of artifact distribution between contexts.
It’s also a great chance for us to come together as a group and see what’s been recovered in other units, as you tend to get tunnel vision limited to your particular excavation unit.
It was really great to get a chance to go through the artifacts we have collected to date on the excavation. I chose this dog tag as our artifact of the day. It says “DOG TAX/1907/PETERBORO/361”.
In 1907, General Electric was leasing the property for the first power station on the west bank, however, we know that people were still living on the parcel. Perhaps this tag came from the neighbouring house, which we know was occupied into the late 1950s.
Dog tax seems to have been a contentious issue at this time. An article in the Lindsay Post from 1907 reporting about dog licensing in Kingson calls people “Animaniacs” and suggests that there are twice as many dogs in Kingston enjoying life than are registered with the tax assessor. The writer suggests that the city offer a 25-cent reward to people who correctly report to the assessor that a dog is not on the list. It also states that “All dogs should be taxed or face the policeman’s revolver!”.
Luckily our unknown Prinnie/Pete/Bobbie/Carlos/Fluffy/Fannie [all names referenced in the article] was registered on our assessor rolls, at least in 1907!
Today we finally were down to the cultural layers of interest and started recovering the amount of artifacts we were expecting. Because it is starting to get complicated on site as we work out the order that we should remove contexts, we are trying an experiment where one student in each excavation group is appointed as the team lead for the day. That means they are in charge of keeping track of progress and implementing the excavation strategy, keeping on top of paperwork, and reporting to either me or James if we stop by for an update.
The west wall group worked on taking down the exterior wall deposit further, practiced a little plan drawing, and began finding some glass and ceramics, metal, buttons, charcoal, coal, and nails mixed in to the fill.
The intrepid west wall crew (l-r) Esther, Riley, Kallie, Alyssa, Jax, Mason and Caroline
The north wall crew continued carefully excavating through several overlapping contexts that fall on the outside of the north wall of the structure. While a lot of it was construction/destruction related debris, they did recover some buttons, ceramic, part of a leather boot, and what looks like a brass lamp base.
Peter and Brooklynn working on removing context 23 in the north wall unit.
We’d been scratching our heads a little why we hadn’t found the same amount of artifacts in excavation areas that are really close to productive units from our last excavations. Today in the midden unit, they placed three exploratory sondages and quickly determined that yes, there is a midden deposit there under some sterile-looking fill. Our usual paper bag recovery system was quickly overwhelmed and we went back to the bin method of artifact collection that we commonly used in 2017 and 2018. Hooray!
A big part of the excavation is making sure we not only know where artifacts came from, but also ensure that that context doesn’t get lost. Each bag/bin gets a number which is associated in the site binder with the context information, date, site, and personnel. That allows us to cross check later during the analysis in case of errors in transcription or attribution.
Looking through some of the artifacts recovered today was like meeting some old friends after a long absence. I recognized some fragments of dishes that we also saw in our 2017 and 2018 midden excavations. Some standout pieces in particular were some flow blue plate fragments, parts of an alphabet border nursery plate, another bonetoothbrush, and another J. & M.P. Bell & Co. Blue Willow plate. We also had some new never-before-seen items as well. If we get rained out later this week, it will be fun to do some lab work to get these finds clean so we can begin the analysis.
I think the artifact of the day would have to be this doll’s teacup recovered from the midden. The bowl of the cup was recovered first, and an hour or two later the fragment with the handle popped up. To our delight they refit perfectly! I suspect this is part of the same doll’s set that we recovered some pieces (a lid to a tiny tureen, and another cup) from 2018. It is great to have further evidence (nurseryware, marbles, toy tea sets) that there were children living and playing here.
A tiny teacup! So cute.
Cameron, Amelie, David and Emily working on excavating the midden sondage units.
The summer kitchen exploration continued. There was a little breakthrough in the morning when they were able to locate the stump of a tree which was cut down after we finished excavating in 2018. As this stump was at the original ground surface, this gave us a good indication that we were soon to encounter the cultural layers of interest! This unit has been a bit of a slow burn so far, but I think it will become pretty interesting pretty quickly. One notable find was an old key, complete from bow-barrel-to-bit, which they joked was from the summer kitchen door (or maybe the back door of the house as that was close by too).
Alex, Bradley, Kira and Sophie working hard on sorting out the relationship between the soil changes from the west to east sides of the unit.
Last but not least, we decided to put another unit in where we think the main midden distribution falls. Xander and Emma worked really hard today getting the sod and upper levelling fill contexts off of their unit, and hopefully they will soon be down into the midden layers.
Emma and Xander working at getting the new unit overburden layers off.
We were visited today by Dr Michael Eamon, Principal of Traill College. He was last here in May 2018, so it was fun to catch him up with our interpretations from those excavations of Structure 1.
Refreshed after the weekend break, we got the trailer unloaded this morning and our base of operations set up and running for another week of excavation. The order of business for today was to take the units we laid out on Friday down to the cultural levels of interest so we can hopefully answer some outstanding questions about the past history of Structure 1.
“Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper…”
Washington Post, 25 October 1911
The first law of holes says essentially “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. Metaphorically this is of course advising how to solve problems of one’s own making. This definitely doesn’t apply to archaeologists because sometimes the answer to one’s problems is that the hole does need to be deeper!
Most of the excavation areas for this season are covered by a lot of fill that wasn’t present in our 2017 and 2018 excavations. In order to level the surface and cover the structure after we finished our excavation, Trent’s groundskeeping crew brought in a lot of fill to cover the archaeological site before grass could be planted. Unfortunately, that fill is now in our way and blocking our view of the cultural layers that were relatively easy to access in 2017 and 2018.
The midden crew identified a new context quite quickly, and despite some dastardly tree roots were able to see where two new contexts were underlying the layer they removed. One layer seems to be mostly empty of artifacts, but we hope the darker layer is the same type of soil we identified previously as midden contexts with lots of artifacts.
James explains how to fill out a context form to the midden crew of (l-r) David, Taryn, Amelie and Cameron.
We made the decision to switch to mattocks for some of the compacted fill for the west wall excavation area, in order to quickly and easily loosen up the soil for removal and screening. The WW crew also tidied up their walls and excavated carefully around the wall rocks, leaving their excavation in nice shape by the end of the day.
West wall crew Kallie, Riley, Jax, Mason, Caroline, Esther and Alyssa work on getting the exterior wall deposit excavated
For the summer kitchen investigation, the Advanced Field Methods students August and Sophie determined through sondage that there is about 47cm of overburden to remove before reaching the contexts of potential interest. The SK team went to it with a will and were able to move a lot of dirt today, bravo!
August and Sophie with their hard working summer kitchen crew of Bradley, Kira and Alex
The north wall crew were able to fully expose the previously excavated wall section in their unit, and then moved to removing the unexcavated contexts to the north of the unit.
Emma, Brooklynn and Peter worked steadily today in taking this unit down. By the end of the day they had almost reached the same level as the excavated wall.
We had a couple visitors on site today, Nii, one of James’s graduate students came by to say hello and see the excavations. We also had a visit from Gordon Dibb, who is a (semi)retired local archaeologist who owns York North Archaeological Services.
The second law of holes states that: “when you stop digging, you are still in a hole.” For archaeologists, then it is time to backfill!
After three days of learning the Guidelines and Standards of Archaeological surveying and excavating from Prof. Conolly and Kate we have begun preliminary surveying of the 2017, house settlement BcGn-23. The history of the landscape was vital in understanding what cultural material we would find versus what had been thrown away. One group accompanied Prof. Conolly to give UTM coordinates for a possible second site next to the housing settlement site already in preliminary surveying which Kira, Alexandra and I were a part of. While Kate and Ana (one of Prof. Conolly’s graduate students) aided students with digging trenches. I especially find Ana’s experience with screening dirt helpful when showing professionalism to CRM contractors.
Excavating the housing settlement was H hot, because tracing smaller squares within the big square, then shoveling the topsoil and screening the soil worked up a sweat. However, Alexandra, Kira and I focused on our strengths and helped each other with our weaknesses; Screening took a lot of endurance and arm strength. I handled the role and when the buckets got too heavy, I moved them. Kira and Alexandra with hand eye coordination were able to maintain a perfect unit without disturbing too much soil, preventing damage to the site. Our objective was to locate the stone wall of the house previously trading owners from Perry to Hughson. Prof. Conolly explained how the changing in landscape reveals the behavior of people at the time. What makes the A in aggravating is digging compacted dirt.
The team and I, once believed we found the stonewall, but it ended up being compacted dirt. After shoveling forty-seven cm deep and extending our pit by 50 cm we found a reference point from the 2017 excavation team and a cobblestone corner of the wall. The strange observation was the stone was square instead of an oval shape Kate showed us on the plans. We also found several nails and an Edgeware plate with the help of Kate’s experience in identifying ceramics such plates, cups and glass bottles helped my team with dating the embossed plate as manuafactured between 1820-1830. Even Ana helped with screening and shoveling techniques such as straightening the wrist and emptying rocks with long strokes, made me feel less aggravated on finding little in our test pit. Finally, the T at the end of the day was tiring.
Teamwork, troweling are all teachable moments for a full day of field school to leave on tired. However, this exhaustion comes from the sense of accomplishment that Kira, Alexandra and I have completed our first pit, first log entry and first lesson about how to conduct a preliminary survey on the Nassau Mills project.
After our first day on site, we continued our exploratory survey to relocate the corners of Structure 1, and set in some new excavation areas that will hopefully give us some new insight into some aspects of the life history of Structure 1.
We’ve divided the site into some sub-excavations, using the Parks Canada archaeological framework as our model. In some cases we extended the area around the test units we placed, and in other cases we have put in new excavation units that hopefully are in the ballpark of the targets we are trying to hit.
David, Amelie and Cameron work on removing sod from what we hope is part of the midden or trash dump we previously located on this side of Structure 1.
MA student Ana (l) supervises the west wall crew (Alyssa, Emma, Esther, Caroline, Kallie, Riley, Jax and Mason) as they remove the sod and topsoil from the newly expanded unit.
Peter, Brooklynn and Xander work on expanding their unit located over the north wall of Structure 1.
August, Alex and Kira begin laying in the unit that we hope will tell us a bit about a possible summer kitchen we know was attached to Structure 1. In the midground, Teagan, Emily and Taryn are putting the sod on their backfilled test unit that was placed to isolate the alignment of the east wall, and in the background we have Amelie, Cameron and David working away on the midden unit.
After packing up the site for the weekend and moving the equipment back to the trailer, we had a little group meeting led by James where we went over our progress so far. Happy weekend everyone, we have completed one week already!
We were visited today by Dr Helen Haines and Dr Jen Newton, both faculty in the Department of Anthropology, based at the Durham campus.
