After many years of good luck, this season we seem to be plagued by rain! Depending on what we are doing we can often work through rain, but in this case if there is a lot of recording, the paper forms don’t survive very well! You can of course get special paper and notebooks that you can write on when wet, but actually in CRM work, rain is often a cause to call the day. Digging in mud means you can’t really see what you are doing as you are digging, and screening mud is also not much fun.
This morning we decided to start in the classroom since it looked like the rain would be over by first break. James went over planning and profiling, as we are getting to that point of the excavation. We also looked at stratigraphy and Harris matrices. After that, some students stayed with me to look at material culture for a little now that we have been finding artifacts, and the rest went with James for more mapping and survey instruction.
After morning break, we met on site when it promptly started to drizzle again. We could see a clearing heading towards us, so we decided to show Stage 2 fieldwalking to the students. Normally the field would have to be ploughed, but we just wanted to give them a taste of what fieldwalking is, especially if any of our students get hired on as field techs for the rest of the summer once they have completed their field school!
This took us to lunch time, so we broke for an hour and then reconvened back on site to do some digging as the weather had improved. We are finally finding artifacts, now that we have dug down through the sterile overburden that was added to the site some time after 2023, so that means back to screening!
We haven’t found much yet, which makes selecting something for artifact of the day a little difficult! Today we had three finds which the students wanted to share with you, as equal billing.
First up is a bullet casing, which is a 22 LR (long rifle) or a 22 long. Both used the same size casing, the difference is the bullet size. We know it had been fired since there is no bullet, and also there is a mark of the firing pin on the base, so we can’t tell which it was. The 22 LR was more common than the 22 long, so it is probably that.
Our casing has a D headstamp which tells us it was made by the Dominion Cartridge Company of Montreal. It appears to have a tinned finish. Dominion first started making .22s in the 1880s, and up until World War II, I believe they were the only company making .22 rounds in Canada. In 1928 they became part of C-I-L (Canadian Industries Limited). I was able to find a later example of these cartridges online after Dominion became C-I-L with the same headstamp (picture lower right), but I can’t date ours for certain as it looks like this particular cartridge was made for a long time.
The 22LR is the most common type of ammunition sold today, as it is useful for hunting, killing vermin, and sport. Perhaps one of the farmers that lived on this parcel was protecting his livestock one day! We do know from past census records that this parcel had sheep, pigs and cows, as well as arable land and an orchard area.
Speaking of livestock, we have finally found some bone on the site, representing some of the animals the inhabitants of this parcel ate. Today we found a longbone shaft fragment, part of a vertebra, and a distal epiphysis (suggesting this was a young not-yet-adult) from what I think is a pig radius. We need to clean them up and compare to our department’s zooarch collection created by department member Dr Eugène Morin.
Our last artifact to showcase today is part of the base of a glass bottle. This was probably some kind of medicine bottle, and the shape suggests it is either rectangular or oval (a more rounded rectangle verging to actual oval shape, these terms are more an approximation as opposed to hard geometry!). This shape was very commonly used by druggists between the late 1870s until the 1920s. They often had proprietary embossing on the flat panels of the bottle. We only have a small part of the base, but it is enough for me to know it was a mouth blown bottle, possibly from a dip mould or probably in a cup bottom mould as that is the most common way these types of bottles were produced (I need to clean it and see if there are mould seams on the heel!). If we had proprietary embossing we could learn when the company existed along with more clues to manufacturing if we had more of the bottle or a finish.
I am quite fond of medicine bottles, it is interesting to track all the various remedies that existed for various complaints, especially those that are basically an approved “medicinal” way to consume some alcohol to take the edge off after an exhausting day of running a farmstead!
The weather reports say it is going to rain steadily all day tomorrow, so we have decided to give the students a day off to study for their upcoming S&G test. See you on Thursday!
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