Month: May 2025

With the forecast last night indicating we would be in for some thunderstorms (and indeed one big storm rolled in around 6am this morning), we decided that today would be a day to catch up on artifact processing, paperwork, and setting the trailer to rights.

We met in the classroom first thing and had a chance to talk about all we have accomplished so far, and what still needs to get done in the last four days (!) of field school. Then everyone headed to the Archaeology Centre, where we had some people counting and bagging the artifacts that had been washed on Wednesday, while others started in on the bags of artifacts that need to be washed.

It is always fun to see the things that come out of the bags!

I had fun today trying to figure out what some of the enigmatic objects we have are. It was satisfying to ID a John Collins bottle, a vacuum tube, and this artifact:

I knew it had to be from some kind of equipment or machinery, but I couldn’t place what it was exactly. It is cast iron, and has three bolts so it obviously was attached to something larger. I was thinking it might be a tractor step, but I now know this is a step from a horse drawn cart or carriage!

You can see a similar one on this illustration of a hansom cab, mounted right underneath the passenger’s feet. Most of the artifacts we have found on the site date to the later phases of occupation, but every once in a while we have a peek into the earlier times of this site, which is exciting!

Here are some in much nicer condition than the one we found!

Perhaps this was made by one of the many carriage makers we know was established in Peterborough in the nineteenth century. The southwest corner of the stretch of Brock Street between Water and George St. in particular had a major carriage factory owned by George Fitzgerald, known in the 1880s as Fitzgerald and Stanger, and later as Fitzgerald and Co.

George Fitzgerald and Charles Stanger were both masters of the carriage trade. Their original factory at Aylmer and Charlotte burned to the ground in September 1882. Francis Birdsall built a new building at Water and Brock to Fitzgerald’s standards. Unfortunately, the new factory also burned down in September 1883, as a fire in a house at George and Brock spread rapidly through the Water St. livery stables of Hopkins and Montgomery, and from there to the carriage factory. It was rebuilt again and later on became the home of the Canadian Canoe Company.

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We got a bunch of artifacts washed and they will hopefully dry over the weekend, the trailer has been cleaned out and organised, and we now have a site map. All in all it was a very successful morning! We stopped at lunch so everyone could start their long weekend a little early.

We’ll meet again on Tuesday for the last four days, happy Victoria Day weekend, everyone!

After the rain of yesterday it was really nice to have just overcast skies today! Work is continuing on the test units, and we are starting to find a lot of artifacts, which will be fun to process in the lab in the last few days of field school.

I usually spend most of the day cycling through all the excavation groups, offering advice or answering questions, and often taking pictures! Some of that is for our records of course, so we can see the progress of the excavation, but I also like capturing little moments of the day.

The forecast says we are going to have rolling thunderstorms in the morning, alas, so we preemptively decided to button up the site for the weekend and focus on artifact processing and paperwork catch-up instead of trying to dig tomorrow. After today we only have five days left!

We’re running out of time so instead of calling a rain day, we needed to work through the steady drizzle that greeted us this morning. It was enough to make paperwork annoying, but not so much as to make it impossible to dig and screen. I think spirits were pretty high despite the weather, our group has really bonded together and are working well at getting the test units excavated!

After lunch I met some of our crew at the Archaeology Centre so that we could start washing some of the backlog of artifacts we have collected. The goal is to get everything washed and at least separated by material type and counted by the end of the field school! Some years that task is easier than others, depending on how much we find!

Excavations are proceeding nicely! As tasks are finishing at the other site, more people are moving over to BcGn-15, so we opened up four new excavation units.

Happy Monday, we are now starting to dig at a new site, BcGn-15, which we last visited in 2024. The goal this year is to focus on the house and determine the extent and character of this site. Hopefully we will get a better idea of the temporal phasing.

Our text excavations in this phase of the field school are a chance for the students to put in practice the skills they have learned and take more responsibility for the excavation and recording.

After the first three excavation areas were underway, we also laid in a unit in the midden deposit visible on the surface. The surface material is more recent, probably 1950s, but we are curious if the midden deposits have an earlier phase that we can link to some of the artifacts we found last season.

Back at the original site, they are continuing to excavate the rubble feature and work on the well. We are starting to accumulate enough artifacts that we can start washing and processing soon, it will be nice to see what we have been finding.