Rushing back and forth between our two trenches today, both growing in scope, it was difficult to escape just how professional the students now are. They dig like experts, distinguish quickly between rocks and artifacts, and otherwise talk like old hands on a dig site.
Question from professor: “What level did that nail come from?”
Response from student, made without pausing, needing to think, or even looking up. “7.5.”
What’s more, the team—for that is very much what we now are—is actively engaging in our strategy discussions… plotting, right along with our resident professional archaeologist and our ever-curious historian, where we should expand, dig, explore.
What is more, our site is a hive of activity!
Finds are a regular occurrence in levels 7 and 8. Nails, both wire and handmade. Glass of various sorts. Brick. Today we turned up a small bit of 19th century Rockingham pottery—a product of nearby Vermont, common stuff. What you’d expect to find in a late 19th century home. There was a tiny, beautiful, fragment of porcelain. There are also more clam shells, potentially supporting the existence of a shore dinner hall on the site.
Trench 1 yielded some green paint. Is it from the house interior or exterior? We have few colorized photographs and they are aerial shots. Zooming in, the house appears white with some sort of darkish trim. Could be green, but it doesn’t look that way. Perhaps there was at least one green room inside?
Team 2 found our first coin, a 1972 penny. It was in level 1 of a newly opened trench expansion. Right where a 1972 penny ought to be. Not much use in dating the lower levels of our trenches, but nice regardless.
The big find of the day, however, is from trench 2 where the team carried on digging down, while also opening a new extension to the trench. They found two things. First, the concrete has a bit of a southerly dog leg on it. The sort of thing you’d find at the base of a door where a wooden frame is mounted. Below that, there’s a beautiful flagstone.
If you line up the best front-on photograph that we have (see below), matching it to the windows of the Decary extension behind, it appears that we’ve probably found the northeastern edge of the garage—a structure that we know was converted into classrooms and dormitory space.
At least, that’s the current hypothesis.
If true, it allows us to finally orient ourselves. We’d initially assumed we were digging at the front of the house. We’re not. This looks like a back door. The front of the house was once much closer to the road.
In a way, this realization is frustrating. We’re fairly limited in terms of where we can dig. Most of what was the house is therefore off limits. Much of it, but certainly not all. We need to carefully think about opening a trench at the front end of our available dig site.
And yet, it is perhaps less frustrating than one might at first think. People don’t toss their waste on the living room floor. The sort of things that might help us get a real sense of how the building was used are therefore probably not in the interior living space. They’re behind the house. We have several curious flags that the Dig Safe team left in for us. Another trench is probably called for.
So, we have our marching orders. Carry on with our existing trenches to confirm the developing picture and open a couple of new test pits, one where we think the interior of the building was located, the other in what was likely the back yard.
We’re planning to add a couple of weekend dig days in the hope of really getting a sense of this site before we must close things up to move full-time into archival and oral history work…
One last thing.
As we were cleaning up, a group of students and the two faculty grew thoughtful. “It’s funny,” said Prof. Anderson. “Each day we think that we’re reaching some conclusions. Then, right at the last minute, those conclusions are challenged and we end up back at the drawing board.”
Our course is loosely based on the format of the popular British archaeology program Time Team. That group has slightly more time than we do, three full working days as opposed to only about 15 hours, to figure out a site and the episodes are thus divided into three parts. Each section tends to end with host Tony Robinson making roughly the same observation as did Arthur.
This parallel cannot be an accident.
— Prof. Eric G.E. Zuelow