Posted on No Comments on End of the second week already

End of the second week already

Time is flying by, we are now at the end of the second week of the field school, halfway done!

It’s taken us this long to get down to the archaeology, and then we will do the next steps, which is recording, and then we will cover everything back up again.

One important part of recording is drawing plans of the excavation. You might ask, in the age of photograph and movie technology, why we would bother getting a human to draw something instead of just taking a picture. We certainly do still take pictures (and movies, sometimes) but a drawing is a special thing as it has interpretive layers built into it in the way a photograph doesn’t. Planning by hand allows nuance and interpretation to enter into the image.

The students who had been excavating in this operation area first tried their hand at planning the rubble feature. I think some of them even enjoyed it! You don’t have to be a good artist to be a good planner as well — we aren’t looking for photorealism, just a schematic of what is going on in the feature of interest.

One thing we hope the students have been learning in our field school is that archaeology is composed of many different tasks, and you don’t have to be excellent at all of them to be a good archaeologist! Being willing to put in a solid effort is the most important thing. There may be some things you really don’t like doing, or feel like you don’t have a natural aptitude, but that is usually balanced by the things you do like doing or learning that you are a quick study at picking up some of the aspects of fieldwork. It’s one of the reasons Trent requires that field experience be part of the archaeology degree, because it is really important to put the theoretical things you learn in classes to practice.

Students are using planning frames of 1m x 1m to help with their frame of reference on their drawings.

The other students continued excavating the midden area. We have located two tarps which should be covering the planking we last discovered in 2023, and the next goal is to see if there is anything more of interest around that feature.

Removing the context layer above the tarps.

Another task today was starting the backfilling. We spend all this time digging nice neat holes but when we are done investigating we need to fill them back in. I can say our group has definitely developed their shovelling skills over the past two weeks, and they got one area backfilled by lunch!

All hands on deck backfilling and screening the last buckets of the morning from the midden operation area.

After lunch we met at the Archaeology Centre for a debrief. We are almost finished at the site, and will begin to move people over to the second site we will be investigating on Monday. They will be with me, while James keeps some of the crew to continue investigating the well and finally getting to excavate the rubble feature! I will be sad not to be there, but it will be fun to explore the new site some more as we did some preliminary work there last summer.

We finished off the day by meeting at our new site and having a little tour to orient everyone to set up shop there on Monday. We broke for the day with best wishes for the weekend. See you all on Monday!

Posted on No Comments on Making progress

Making progress

Well, the weather fooled us yesterday, it was a beautiful day with not a drop of rain! A day off meant everyone was ready to go this morning!

We had some visitors to site today! Dr Laure Dubreuil from the Anthropology Department, and Yumi Pedoe, our Academic Administrative Assistant came bearing some cake and cookies! Charles Cumberland, one of Laure’s MA students also came along, and Michael Obie, a former MA student of James’s (and no stranger to this site!), who is now a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto!

We’re well into the excavation at the site, and now our excavation areas are getting cleaned up and defined. We have three areas we are focusing on for the remaining few days we have at this site. I was not on the top of my photography today, I apologize for the number of students with eyes closed!

First is the well, we uncovered and documented it a bit in 2023, but now we are going to collect some more standardised data, and have the students profile it.

James investigating the well from the inside!
Jacob and Thomas worked really hard today exposing the outer face of the well shaft. We will be cleaning it up so we can see and draw the coursing.

The second area of focus is the rubble structure, which James christened as “The Eminence” today. We hypothesised it was maybe a root cellar, and I have found some recent articles which do suggest that this is likely what this feature is. The students worked steadily today uncovering the rest of the drain and rubble. They can do plan drawing tomorrow morning and then hopefully we can remove a section to see how far down it goes and what is inside. There are artifacts peeking out tantalising everyone for tomorrow’s work!

(I think they are now the EarthRats): Asha, Matie, Breanna, Kyra, Nicolas, Megan, and The Eminence.

The third area of the site is around the planking we found in 2023 and potentially a midden area. The students working in this area were able to determine the previously excavated part of this unit, and have been steadily digging down to the covered feature. Tomorrow we will hopefully be able to reveal the planking again and see if there is anything around it that we didn’t see before.

Rats: Mason, Greg, Romy, Haley and Enya clearing out the backdirt from the previously excavated area.

The students not excavating today were finishing up their maps from their survey exercises. I think everyone is mostly finished with that now.

Jordan and Julie didn’t get enough of their first round of surveying exercises so were happy to partner with Zenya so that she could collect her data.

Tomorrow is the last day of the second week, we are almost halfway through the field school already!

Posted on No Comments on Tired of Rain Tuesday!

Tired of Rain Tuesday!

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!

“Wait for itttttt…..!” James had everyone line up a couple metres apart to start the walk.
At the end of our exercise, we now have a new crew of veteran fieldwalkers!

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!

A little mud can’t stop us!
The students are learning how to excavate, balancing the depth taken plus keeping the walls of the unit nice and vertical as they go! Trinity, Zenya and Romy are doing a nice job here.

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.

22 LR cartridge

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.

Three fragments of animal bone from today (top – long bone shaft fragment, left – vertebra fragment, right – distal epiphysis).

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.

Medicine bottle base
Part of a rectangular medicine bottle base.

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!

Posted on No Comments on Meticulous Monday

Meticulous Monday

Welcome to the start of our second week of field school. Our diggers are now familiar with all the main tasks that they need to learn as archaeologists, and now comes practice, practice, practice! We cycled people through many different tasks today: some learned how to plan the well, some took over surveying, some finished their maps, some continued excavation, and some went back and forth!

Our midden extension being dug is looking good, they finally cleared off the last of the overburden and were ready to start the next context down. We are finding more artifacts in this layer finally, which is a nice change from shovelling off sterile overburden from the site! We are hoping that this area of the site will give us some more domestic context artifacts that can tell us about the people who lived in the log cabin on this little farmstead. So far we have found some nails, many different decorated ceramic sherds, and a bit of window and bottle glass.

We have also moved a huge amount of earth today in homing in on the drain and rubble feature we last uncovered in 2023. It was really great to see a mucky hole in the ground turning back into a proper excavation unit.

I didn’t take many pictures because I was running hither and yon between the excavations and other activity stations, but here are some shots from today. Tomorrow, the weather isn’t looking the best, but hopefully it will only be a bit of drizzle in the morning and we can spend a good full day in the field.

A really nicely cleaned midden excavation area, ready to excavate context 2! I am starting to recognize people by their boots.
Now that we are finding artifacts, it is back to screening for Jordan and Haley! In the background you can see another group (Julie, Mason, Asha, and Matie) planning the well.
At one point of the day, all the structure diggers had been siphoned off to other tasks, so MA student Hailey jumped in to continue clearing back over the tarp.
Matie, Asha, Hailey and Julie working on discovering the extent of the previously excavated part of the rubble feature.
This sight made me laugh, because it looks like Jordan is a petitioner at a shrine where MA student (and 2023 field crew!) Lorna is an oracle, dispensing the mysteries of planning a well.
You can see how site was busy today! Enya and Greg screening, Zenya and Haley excavating Context 2 in the midden area, and in the background some survey crews collecting their data.
Posted on No Comments on End of first week already!

End of first week already!

Well, the weather has been a bit of a trial, but we have soldiered on as best we can! The heavy, cold rain of yesterday afternoon continued overnight, and as a result we had a sticky, slippery, muddy mess on our hands today on site.

Since the Rats have finished their survey exercises, we swapped them in so they could have their first chance at digging, and the Raccoons were converted into three survey teams to begin working on their survey and mapping exercise.

Kyra, Breanna, and Megan of Raccoon 1 successfully levelled their instrument on the tripod, so now can go begin their survey assignment.
Team Raccoon 6 (Jacob, Thomas, and Nicolas) familiarising themselves with their instrument for their survey exercise.
James shows the newly styled Trash Pandas (Sam, Syd, and Emma) the secrets to levelling an instrument.
Suyang, Lorna, Hailey and Zenya have uncovered the well and are learning how to illustrate it in plan view.
The supergroup RatWorms (Falon, Lauren, Haley, Maddy, Enya and Trinity) working on expanding the excavation area around the potential structure we found in 2023.
Rats (Jordan, Asha, Matie, Mason, Julie, Romy and Greg) were excited to start some digging today! This new unit is placed so we can further investigate some planking and midden-like areas first identified in 2023.

The surveying exercise is designed so the students learn and practice a suite of useful skills for surveying in fieldwork. A simulated artifact scatter is represented by the yellow flags. The survey team needs to learn how to set up the instrument and level it over a datum point, collect the locations of the artifacts, take elevation measurements, and also learn how to set in excavation units according to the rules in the standards and guidelines. They then need to figure out how to take all the data and produce a map of the scatter with elevation contours and the location of the proposed test units.

James showing Nicolas, Jacob and Thomas how to set baselines for their grid.
Kyra, Breanna and Megan are point plotting the location of their artifact scatter.
Sam uses the telescope to collect the location of one of the artifacts in the simulated scatter.

We also said goodbye today to our faithful sun canopies, who were no match for the intense thunderstorm and high winds we have experienced this week. Duct tape could only do so much, and the winds today were the final death knell.

Despite the mud and bad weather, we’ve made great progress this week! On Monday the Raccoons will continue their survey exercises, and the Rats and Earthworms will continue excavating and also learn how to plan the well. If we have time we might also excavate it too, but we only have five more days at this site before we head to another!