Nassau Mills Research Project

Cole Gauthier-Bough

      While working at a site named the ‘bone pit’, naturally you are going to find bones. Our site, OA-2, was likely a waste pit/midden meaning that we were going to find a lot of artifacts that were thrown away, including compost. Bones are crucial archaeological evidence as they give insight into the site itself and its inhabitants, providing evidence for diet, animal husbandry and lifestyle. On this site, we found many fragmented animal bones which can contribute to the reconstruction of their diet.

      The picture above is representative of the bones that were excavated, with most of the bone elements found being ribs, vertebrates, metapodials and the talus. However we found a variety of bones, these elements were just the most common. There are many things we can observe from the bones, such as that they were buried for a significant amount of time signified by the dark colouration of the bone, but also that the rib and tibia were cut with tools, such as saw. Many of the ribs and long bones found on OA-2 were professionally cut, likely by a butcher, and some of the sliced bone found, I observed them with having a visual representation of hesitation marks.

Figure 3 shows one of many cut bones that we found in our site, likely a cow rib. Visually the post-mortem damage to the bone was not caused by natural processes but human intervention, as the bone was neatly sliced (most likely with a saw). In addition to the hesitation marks, the animal remains that show evidence for being sliced were most likely done by a butcher as the cuts were very clean, and hesitation marks were rarely observed. In Figure 1 there is also another cattle rib, which we found several of, while on site that also demonstrated a lack of hesitation and being sliced precisely. From these bones, we can infer that the past residents of this site would’ve likely had a diet where they consistently ate pork and cow, particularly cattle short rib, leg of pork (See Figure 4), and/or some sort of steak.

      Another interesting find that gives insight into diet is the amount of pig taluses we found. We found seven taluses (Big day for talus fans like me). The taluses could be waste if the residents of the site got pig leg from the butchers and then made their own cuts from the leg or the pigs feet were a part of their diet, which is not implausible as ragoût de pattes de conchon is a somewhat popular French Canadian dish, so it is not uncommon for Canadians to eat pigs feet.

Grace Styvers

When we first started digging at our unit (OA11) at site BcGn-15, I was unsure of what we were going to find. I definitely was not expecting to find as many burnt rusty nails as we did, but I was also not expecting to find a ceramic sherd with a legible factory mark. I had taken Lab Methods 2: Transformative Tech before field school and really enjoyed the ceramic portion of the course, and so I was excited at the possibility of identifying this ceramic sherd. Over the four weeks of excavation, we only found two sherds with the same factory mark, and while both are fragmented, they do not form one vessel, meaning that there are at least two vessels from the same manufacturer at the site. From the factory mark, Kate was able to identify that the sherds were manufactured by the pottery company Alfred Meakin. 

After doing some of my own research on the Alfred Meakin company and the sherds, I found that the company was named after Alfred Meakin, one of four brothers who were pottery manufacturers in England. From 1865 to 1873, Alfred was in business with his brother Charles Meakin at Meakin Bros / C & A Meakin; however, in 1873, he left Meakin Bros / C & A Meakin and created his own company in Tunstall, England, named after himself. In 1896, the company became a limited company, and after Alfred died in 1904, the company was owned and run by his son, Alfred James Meakin, and later his nephew, Stuart Johnson. In 1974, Myott, another pottery manufacturing company, purchased the company’s share capital, leading to its eventual merger with Myott-Meakin Ltd in 1976. The company specialized in earthenware tableware and tea sets.

The sherds we found on site are refined white earthenware and most likely came from a tableware set. While there is no visible decoration on the sherds, we were able to tell from the factory mark that, in their complete form, the vessel would have had a gold border, as indicated by the “_OLD BORDER” written below the factory mark. After the company became a limited company, they began including ‘Ltd’ after the company’s name in their marks; however, in the 1930s, they stopped including it. Our sherds do not have ‘Ltd’ in their marks, which indicates that they were produced in or after the 1930s. 

While they changed over time, Alfred Meakin factory marks often included the names of their patterns or shapes’ names above the mark, and so it is reasonable to assume that the “hape” above the mark is referring to the vessel’s shape. While we do not have the rest of the mark and are unable to definitively identify the shape, after a couple of hours of looking at different Alfred Meakin factory marks, I was able to find one that matches the one we found on site. The image below shows a mark that is the same design as ours and has the same patent number. It also indicates that the vessel is a Harmony shape. While there are differences between the two marks, such as the fact that ours states there’s a gold border while the online example does not, the similarities could suggest that our sherds came from a vessel with the Harmony shape.

Originally, we thought that the number underneath the mark was a UK pattern registration number; however, the complete example I found online with the same mark shows that it is a U.S. patent number. Typically, this would suggest that the ceramics design was registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office; however, after discussing it with Kate and looking up the number, it corresponds to a fabric printing machine patent from 1868. Given this mismatch, and after talking with Kate, it is possible that the number on the ceramic may be a fake patent registration used to discourage other companies from copying their designs.  The mystery of the patent number raises some questions about the circulation of these ceramics. Alfred Meakin was strictly a UK based company, but it may be possible that, at some point, they began producing some of their products for export to the United States, which would offer another explanation for the USA patent number. These sherds could also give us some insight into the people who occupied the site. Our unit and others have found U.S. related artifacts such as U.S. wheat pennies and a Boston fountain pen nib, so it is possible that the people who occupied the site had connections to the United States, possibly through work, family, travel, moving to Canada, or entirely different circumstances. 

Tony Mohan

Since I was a small boy growing up I always had an interest in ancient history and finding new things by just digging in the soil. My interest in Archaeology really sparked when I started watching the documentary series that National Geographic offered on TV, which included the Egyptian ruins in Giza, Alexandria and Saqqara. 

Thanks to James and Kate who are not just kind people, but are excellent professors. They gave me an opportunity to be part of this field study at Trent in the Nassau Mills area BcGn-15, OA8. I am in my third year of Archeology at Trent and it has been exciting learning experience when it comes to stratigraphy, the dig site, and the Theodolite and Total Station for measuring vertical/horizontal angles, distances and coordinates.

The highlight would be with the cleaning/sorting and categorizing all the artifacts that we excavated on the site. I constantly referred to the Archeological field manual and the Artifact reference guide that was compiled by James and Kate to confirm the type of nails, glassware, ceramic or metal can, to name a few.

Out in the field we came across two good finds, a 10k mens gold ring with a garnet center piece, and a plastic red cracker jack prize probably from the 1950s, a Chief sending smoke signals stand-up figure.

The weather was outstanding during the four week period. It was pretty good with a nice moderate warm heat with an occasional shower.

Thanks to the other five members of team “Bear”, David, Kaitlyn, Makayla, Carly and Hazel that contributed to the success of the excavation.

Konrad Morawski

The excavation of OA11 ended up being much more complex than I once thought. On the first day when James and Kate told the foxes that we were going to be digging up a potential basement and all we could see was a couple rocks and a small void, I was expecting a small crawlspace and maybe a couple stones indicating a wall.  Spoiler, I was wrong.

After expanding our original 2x3m grid to a 3x3m grid and removing the top soil we slowly started to uncover a wall. We were surprised to see how much of the wall was still standing and we were able to start visualizing how our wall would connect to the other contexts around us.

Once we had planned and identified all the different contexts in our grid we decided it would be best to dig down the interior context (107) to get a better idea of what room this may have been and what kind of artifacts we would find in it. After a couple more days of excavation we identified context 107 as a fill/destruction deposit from when Trent demolished the house in the 1960s. We were finding glass, ceramics and A LOT of rusty nails.

Nearing the end of the excavation, we found a concrete footing beneath the stone wall that we had previously excavated. This brought up a lot of questions, but thanks to Kate, we were able to identify it as a process called underpinning, which was done to strengthen the stone wall when they dug down to deepen the basement. We decided to dig a 1x1m sondage to try and see how deep the floor was (rather than take down 107 altogether), and thankfully, we were able to find it before we started backfilling.

I think one of the best parts about the field school was seeing in real time how much I improved in terms of confidence in excavating and my ability to identify artifacts. If I look back on the first day versus the last one I can see a huge difference. Another cool part was seeing all of the content that I learned in class start to appear in real life. For example, I was able to identify a lot of bones using what I learned from Archaeozoology, which I didn’t think I was going to be able to do, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Sarah Kennedy

Starting this archaeology field school, I didn’t really know what to expect. I have never been a big outdoors person, and yet I signed up to spend a month outside digging in the dirt. I really wanted the experience though, and to truly understand what it meant to do archaeology and work in the field. After the first couple of days, I started to get it, I had dirt under my fingernails, my hands were muddy, my pants were covered in dirt, I was sweating, but it was fine. Not caring about the dirt and the outdoors allowed me to fully immerse myself in the experience and get the job done, and I actually really enjoyed it. Sifting through the dirt and finding things was my favorite part, I got really good at picking things out from organic material. I even had Kate and James say “good eye” for finding something small or identifying bone from other materials, which made me feel like maybe I did know what I was doing, and was decent at it.

            As an anthropology major, I spend a lot of time looking at bones in classrooms, but I never had the opportunity to apply that knowledge in a real world setting until now. Knowing what was bone and what wasn’t was very helpful while sifting through the dirt, I even had my group members (the snakes) asking me if something was bone or not and which bone it might be. This made me feel like all those endless hours of lectures and labs talking about and analyzing bones weren’t a waste.

This was another really cool find from unit OA-11 that I got to do some research on to find out exactly what it was. These are fragments from an Alfred Meakin plate dating to the 1930s+. What you see is a small fragment of the rim of the plate with this silver detailing, and then a fragment with the name Alfred Meakin in green on it which would have been on the underside of the plate.