by Michael Hornsby
Field Blog For 9/25 & 9/27
9/25- Also my Birthday
To Our Dearest Readers,
Please bear with me as I write this
for we are unbelievably close to the end, and I am trembling with excitement.
As many of you know, for the past several weeks the four of us-Sarah Coffey,
Connor Sparks, Daniel Rhodes, and myself (Michael Hornsby), not to mention the
Illustrious Dr, Dumas- have been furiously working on finishing Transects One
and Two. This has been quite fun but exhausting. During this time, we
have found a colonial brick fragment and two pieces of pottery, one was a piece
of 18th-century tin-glazed, and the other a fragment of a
bottle. Hopefully, I will have news as soon as I get back from today’s class.
Alright, I have good news and not bad
but slightly disappointing news. We are finished with Transects one AND two.
Not to mention we also found a colonial nail today. The hole we found had a
very strange dirt color consistent with a midden, so we will be coming back to
it and digging around it to check for other artifacts. The reason we think it
was a midden (a layer of debris or trash created by human activity) was due to
the dark color of the dirt. It was very dark and obviously rich with nutrients
due to the large amount of foliage growing around it, but also possibly 18th-century
food remains and charcoal. Towards the bottom of the shovel test hole there was
a very fine layer of material similar to ash, but Dr. Dumas believes it was
crushed chalk. Though we all have our doubts about this we filled the hole back
in marking it so we could come back. That is the slightly disappointing news.
:(
9/27
Today will be intriguing. Dr. Dumas
sent out a message saying we will be water screening today. I'm kind of
excited, but apprehensive about whether or not we will find anything. The last
time we water screened we found nothing. Water screening, by the way, is where
we put remaining shovel test dirt and break it down with water to find smaller
artifacts. Normally, all dirt is sifted through screens while the hole is being
dug, but soil in the Black Belt is very clayey and doesn’t easily go through a
screen. I will tell you later today how it goes.
Water screening went great today and I
happen to have several tidbits of good news again. We finished screening every
sample from Transects 1 and 2. Which that alone is a fantastic thing, but we
found another nail!! We also found a piece of Indian pottery which is amazing.
This was a very satisfying wrap up to what we have done this far.
We will be going back to Transect 2 in
order to look one last time at one of the shovel tests. But we will be going on
to bigger and better things. What we have one this far has given us a really
great appreciation for what we find as well as an amazing experience in field
archaeology. I personally cannot wait to see what's next.
