Madeleine Cote
It started as just another day of excavating on site BcGn-15. While our comrades, the rats
and raccoons, worked on their respective units, four of the earthworms, Avery, Cam, Lauren
and I would take turns digging and sifting the contents of our unit, OA 7. The digging felt slow,
with my shovel repeatedly pinging off rocks before finding purchase in the compact soil
underneath. Sifting was not much of a break with the amount of shaking of the screen
required to pass all the loose dirt and small rocks. We kept finding bits of glass, ceramic
sherds and nails. Lots of nails. Long nails, short nails, bent nails. All very rusty, but nails,
nonetheless. Until Avery, while sifting, found scraps of paper with legible writing on them.
This was exciting as it broke the increasing monotony of finding rusty nails and pieces of
broken glass. While all artifacts are important and help archeologists better understand the
site, some generate more excitement than others. These scraps of paper being one of them.
We quickly showed James and Kate the paper scraps and they reported back to us that at
least one fragment was from George Orwell’s Animal farm. As shown in the picture above,
you can clearly read ‘Snowball’, one of Manor farm’s pigs. This was exciting, for it was
something that I knew. I read Animal Farm in high school. To find an old fragment of it in a
university class was really cool.
To find not only paper but a fragment with clearly visible words on it is thrilling since paper
preserves incredibly poorly over time, so it is rarely found in an archeological context.
Specific conditions are needed for paper artifacts to be conserved since it is vulnerable to
light, water, damp conditions, insects and heat. Paper also requires delicate handling,
especially as it ages.
Since we know what book the paper fragments come from, we now have a terminus post
quem for the unit. A terminus post quem is the earliest possible date for an object. Because
Animal Farm was published for the first time in 1945, the deposit found in OA7 cannot be
older than that. This is very useful information for we are finding objects that are older than
1945 such as the metal horse-drawn carriage step, the one that Kate wrote a post about.
This indicates that OA7 was potentially a garbage dump.