Posted on No Comments on The day has finally come…

The day has finally come…

Field schools are quite an intense experience, very different from university courses you take during the fall and winter terms of the year. You are thrown in amongst people you maybe recognize on campus, but don’t really know, and then spend hours on hours and days upon days in close proximity with them, often doing physically or mentally taxing tasks.

If you are lucky a bond forms, and then suddenly you have a new group of friends, and maybe clarity about your next steps. I assume for some of our students, taking this field school was a real life-changing experience!

The sad part about field school is that it is suddenly over, and then you are thrown out of the bubble and back into your old life. We have reached that day for the 2026 season, I am sad to say. It was an excellent month, and an excellent crew. We accomplished more than we thought we would be able to do, and learned some interesting things about this site that we didn’t uncover in our previous two excavations here.

We had a morning of last minute mini-lectures from James, a guest lecture by one of James’s grad students Ana Henao, who works in CRM. I talked a little about the report writing process, and some of the ways you can find historical documentation to help with writing a report. Finally, each group presented the results of their research while we feasted on pizza courtesy of James, and I brought in two snacking cakes, one with rhubarb picked from my garden and the second chocolate peanut butter.

All too soon the final goodbyes were said! That doesn’t mean that posts will stop for a while yet, however. Stay tuned for student blog posts for the next couple of weeks. I might also pop in during the summer as I work on analysing artifacts and preparing the reports.

Posted on No Comments on Good-bye for now, BcGn-15!

Good-bye for now, BcGn-15!

We convened at the trailer this morning for the strategy session as we are winding down the 2026 field school. Excavation of a site means a controlled destruction as we convert a physical record into many papers, digital files, GIS, databases, illustrations, and eventually, a report.

Even though archaeology by its nature is destructive, that doesn’t mean that once excavations are done, we just drop our tools and walk away. Since we might return to this site to conduct future research, our goal was to geotextile the walls and foundations we have discovered this season, to both protect them, and make it easier to uncover them again. Then all the rocks and earth painstakingly shovelled, trowelled, screened, and deposited in backdirt piles needed to get back in the excavation units.

Everyone is so much better at digging than they were when we started, four short weeks ago!

We started with the Ladybug’s first unit, which as it was a single context excavation with no features, did not require geotextile, just a lot of rocks and dirt shovelled back in and tamped down.
And done!
The cesspit beside the Foxes unit was filled back in with some textile and some bracing across to make it more safe in case people are walking in that area in future. Bears and Foxes units had a double wrap approach, where we wrapped the walls, and then put the large rocks and stones in, then a second textile layer, followed by the dirt. That way the dirt layer can be shovelled out, and the rocks can be removed easily as they won’t be re-encased in dirt.
In the background you can see the Bears working on their second textile layer, while the Snakes unit in the foreground is ready for dirt.
It is pretty amazing how quickly weeks of painstaking excavation disappear!
By lunch we were finished! A bittersweet moment to see. BcGn-15 is all tucked in, ready to slumber until our next visit…

Tomorrow we have some last classroom lectures, info about the field days each student has earned, a guest lecture by one of James’s MA students, and then we will break at lunch for one last pizza and cake celebration!

Posted on No Comments on Wrung-out Wednesday and the first student blog post of the 2026 season

Wrung-out Wednesday and the first student blog post of the 2026 season

Hello everyone, after the scorching temperatures of yesterday, we had decided on a mostly indoors day to catch up on the artifact backlog in washing, primary processing, and continuing analysis. Unfortunately due to construction near the Arch Centre, the water had to be turned off so it wasn’t possible to work there today. So some people came up to the teaching lab with me to work on artifact processing, and some who still needed to do a plan and/or a profile for their portfolio went out to site with James in another blazing hot day.

Since I don’t have anything really to share on my end, I have posted the first of many student blog posts, which will continue posting daily after the field school ends on Friday. There is no required format, just that they focus on some aspect related to the field school with you! I hope those reading this will follow along and enjoy what our students have to share with you.

Kaitlyn Ross

Working on BcGn-15 OA8, we have some REALLY interesting and complex topography, which we have denoted as the destruction layer, that occurred from the bulldozing that happened in this area in the 1960’s when Trent University purchased the land. We’ve dug around and removed as many of the large boulders as we can, and thanks to David, we’ve even removed the large slab of concrete that crossed over the “void”. Mapping this was quite tedious but with some patience and hard work it was done. To get the specific information for our OA we used a theodolite and a total station to get the coordinates and the levels of our unit, which I find really cool.

The concrete slab crossing the void
Plan of OA8

We’ve had some really interesting finds in our unit, from a gold ring to bones, to nails, to glass and ceramics and much more. Being in Bioanthropology I am a big fan of bones and love attempting to identify them. Of those we’ve found in our unit we’ve determined that most of them are Pig bones. We’ve found Pig ulna, humerus, ribs, vertebra and some other element that has yet to be identified. We’ve also found a partial mandible of a small rodent and a metapodial of what I assume is from a raccoon. 

Pig ulna
Selfie with a pig vertebra

We’ve also had some fun and not so fun, for some of us, visitors in our unit. I had a small mouse scurry across my foot and hide in a hole of our north wall, we’ve had a colony of large spiders move into the area we call the “void” and a snake slither along the edge of our south wall. Those were the first visitors, which were the scariest for a good portion of our group. The next visitors were a little toad and a fluffy little caterpillar, which we gently removed and set free in a safer place away from all the sharp tools.

Little toad
Our visitor the snake, not to be confused with the group the SNAKES
One of the many spiders that visited the void

I have a special mention for the various poses and outfits that occur while out in the field digging. I specifically find it much more efficient, comfortable and fun to get my legs out of the way when digging, and to expose my knees when it gets hot.

Posted on No Comments on A terrific Tuesday, T-4

A terrific Tuesday, T-4

Oh, we packed a lot in to today, everyone is wiped out. At the end of the day yesterday I thought about the foundation some more and did some research. My initial thought was they must have dug the cellar deeper at some point, and our evidence points to using a technique called underpinning. In essence, to lower the floor of the basement, sections of the soil under the foundation were cut away at an angle to make bays, and then forms placed in and concrete poured in. Once it has cured, the next bays are excavated and filled with concrete. The process is repeated until the perimeter is complete. Since we only have part of the building exposed here, we don’t know how far it goes around the perimeter of the foundation. It may be that only part of the cellar was lowered to make room for services like the water line we can see or a furnace.

This is an example of a modern underpinning job in progress on a historic rubble foundation similar to ours. The main difference is that this house is in Norway, and the rubble walls on this structure are almost a metre thick, and the foundation comes down onto bedrock. This restorer has also put rebar into the bedrock and the sides of the completed bays to tie everything together. Source: Ian Anderson

Since we had to make some decisions with time running out, the plan was to take a sondage in the corner of the foundation to see if we could get the depth of the cellar, and maybe find some more artifacts that might tell us about the destruction event of the house.

The sondage reveals our underpinning walls come down onto a poured slab, and are more vertical than the example, but it seems clear that at some point the damp crawlspace cellar was improved by ekeing a bit more depth.
Konrad used his newly aquired skills after completing the mapping data collection assignment to level and set up the totalstation over our datum except instead of too tall, which is common when a tall person sets it up, he overcompensated. I guess kneeling while taking elevations is more restful!
James is standing in the cellar with the reflector touching the base of the sondage so Konrad can get a depth measurement of the cellar floor.
Once the Foxes (Dee, Mischa, Konrad and Grace) had completed the sondage, they got some instructions from James for their mapping exercise and decamped to the Arch Centre.
Much planning and wall profiling done today! Here Jocelyn and Sarah are recording the west wall profile of their excavation unit.
Cole, Johanna, and Jay worked on planning and wall profiles of parts of OA8.

We ended the day sweaty, sunburnt, but satisfied! Tomorrow we are planning on a day indoors to catch up on artifact processing and analysis. Some of our crew haven’t yet completed a plan and a profile for their portfolios so we need to fit that in as well before backfilling on Thursday!

Posted on No Comments on The beginning of the end, five days left

The beginning of the end, five days left

We are into the last week of field school, which means today is the last planned day of excavation. We also have a ton of recording to do in the other parts of the site where excavation has been completed.

Tony and David of the Bears began the day by doing another plan of the contexts exposed in their excavation unit.
They were soon joined by other Bears, who were working on drawing the exposed stone walls.
Since the Bear’s unit was full of planners, Makayla jumped in to draw the wall profile of the Ladybug’s unit. This involves setting a level line above the ground surface, and using it as a reference point to draw the exposed face of the excavation area and any different soils, rocks, inclusions etc. are present.
The Snakes still had a bit of excavation left to do, so they worked on levelling the floor of their unit and tidying the walls in preparation for, you guessed it, planning and profiling.
The Ladybugs have moved to their new unit, which we predicted is either a well or a cesspit. It’s looking more and more like it is a cesspit, so we won’t be doing too much else at this point. But first they need to clear back the overlying soil that has accumulated since the house was destroyed.
The Foxes made it their goal today to excavate as much of the cellar fill as possible, including heaving out large slabs of concrete from the destruction event.
More slabs coming out!
The Ladybugs went to the Arch Centre to help with artifact processing, so Lucas stepped in to do the final clean up of their unit for them.
As is extremely common in archaeology, there is usually some major development that inconveniently happens RIGHT before excavations need to end. Today was that day for this field school. The Foxes worked extremely hard in moving a ton of fill and slabs and right at the end of the day we discovered a concrete sill under the field stones of the foundation, and no sign of a floor. This will require a ponder overnight so we can tackle it tomorrow.

It was a very busy, productive day on site. Tomorrow we need to sort out what is happening in the Foxes unit, and get more recording done!