In the Top 10 for 2010!!!!

Working on the center posthole of the 1608 church's east wall.

So, it's been a while, but this is news worth sharing. First, analysis is still being done on artifacts from the John Smith well. Some really exciting things have been found, including these personalized pipes!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/31/AR2010123101033.html

This article from Yahoo News has a better picture of the pipes in question:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101231/ap_on_re_us/us_jamestown_tobacco_pipes

Equally exciting is this article:

http://articles.dailypress.com/2010-12-31/news/dp-nws-jamestownchurch-evg-20101231_1_jamestown-rediscovery-project-jamestown-church-william-m-kelso

Archaeology magazine has voted the find of the 1608 church as one of the Top 10 archaeological finds of 2010! That puts it right up there with ancient pyramids in Peru, 4th-century royal Mayan tombs, and a 3.6-million-year-old skeleton from an early hominid in Ethiopia. Pretty exclusive list!

My favorite line of the article is this:

"The first clues to its [the church's] survival appeared in early summer when students from the project's field school discovered a pair of unusually large rectangular stains hidden beneath a deep layer of modern fill near the fort's center."

"Valerie's feature" as we found it in the first week of excavations.

Remember the feature Danny jokingly called "Valerie's feature"? That was the more southerly of the two "unusually large rectangular stains" - and I love that they mention the field school in the article. As I mentioned before, it was so exciting to help put something on the map at Jamestown, and it was an honor to work with and learn from the talented staff at Jamestown Rediscovery. At last count, their continuing excavations had uncovered nine postholes of the (presumed) fourteen that would make up the church's footprint. (Check out "The Dig" at http://www.historicjamestowne.org/ for more information!)

The nine church postholes appear marked in the center purple polyhedron on the map.
(Image respectfully borrowed from the Historic Jamestowne website at http://www.historicjamestowne.org/.)

In less exciting news, a personal update - I am off to the annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Austin this coming week. Steve's sister and her family live in Austin, so we will stay with them. The girls and Steve will be able to visit whilst I'm off being all archaeological. :) It will be a fun start to the new year (although going back to our respective schools after the 16+ hour drive home will be a bit of a challenge!

I'm happy to report I made straight As in classes this semester (well, ecstatic, acutally!) and my research paper about the women of James Fort was well-received by my professors. So well received, in fact, that one prof suggested I expand on it for my thesis, while another put me in touch with one of Colonial Williamsburg's historians as a resource for my research. Not only was he interested in my proposed research, he suggested I might want to apply to their fellowship program for the summer! Very exciting! I'm beginning to feel like I might really be good at this archaeology stuff!

Needless to say, 2010 was a very good year. I hope 2011 will be even better!

On The Map . . .

It seems very strange to be sitting at home, in my own bed, blogging about Jamestown. Five weeks on and my callouses have all but disappeared, my family is happy to have me home, and we have all started our respective schools. I am in a Master's Program in Historical Archaeology at Illinois State University this fall which means I'm taking classes in Historical Archaeology, Zooarchaeology, and Research Designs in Archaeology (and trying to stay ahead of the readings while at the same time doing all sorts of Mommy-related things like host birthday parties and get everyone else off to school!) I know it has been a long time since I've posted, and I did not post updates during my final week at Jamestown as I'd hoped to do, but I promise I have a really good reason for not doing so. Read on . . .


When last I posted about the intrepid field crew, we had just survived a "dreadful storm and hideous". Danny returned on Tuesday, and much conversation ensued about "my" feature. We had gone through several theories at this point: soldier pit, saw pit, possibly even the base of a gallows! We were confused by the very regular shape to the hole, which at this point we were assuming was an intrusive posthole and mold within a larger feature. Such regular edges implied modern equiptment had been used to dig the hole and place the post, which just didn't jive with the really early artifacts coming out of the hole (copper scraps, trade beads, and pieces of brigandine armor, mostly.) At one point during the final week of field school I had asked Danny if the larger feature could be a really big posthole, and the entire hole could be postmold for a really large support, but Danny brushed off that suggestion. He said, "we never get anything that big at Jamestown."

Theories aside, it was looking very similar to the hole-within-a-larger-feature that Alex and Amedeus had been excavating in the last week of field school. When Danny and I measured it from center to center of the holes, it came out to exactly 12 feet. Danny said, "whoa!" but I wasn't sure why, or whether 12 feet was significant.

"My" feature as of Tuesday morning.

Lo and behold, 12 was the magic number! Much talking amongst the staff occured at this point. As it turns out, William Strachey had described the church built in 1608 as "a pretty chapel . . . It is in length threescore foot, in breadth twenty-four . . . " (from "A True Reportory, Pt. 3" as quoted in Jamestown Narratives, edited by Edward Wright Haile). Our two holes, at 12 feet apart, could (in theory) be part of a 24-foot long wall. Much more talking and measuring ensued . . .



Going 12 feet to the south of "my" feature put us into a portion of the ditch and trench that Mary Anna had been working on in the last week of field school, right in the southwest corner of our open excavation area. Dan Smith made short work of what was left in the trench.

And, of course, there was a third gigantic posthole and mold under the later fill! (The postmold is at the center top, partially covered by unexcavated fill.)

So now we had Alex and Amedeus's posthole and mold:

The one Danny, David H. and I had worked on, now right in the center:

And the one in M.A.'s trench that Dan had found (in this photo it's cleaned up and a little easier to recognize, just to the left of the utility pipe in the bottom of the trench.)

If Stratchey's measurements were correct (and he'd been exactly right about the lengths of the palisade walls!), and if we did indeed have the east wall of the church, the next thing to do would be to make a right turn with our tape measures and see what we might find to the west. The southern end of the wall - the posthole in the trench - was very near the side wall of the excavation, but because the wall angled up to the northeast, Alex and Amedeus's posthole was a good 15 feet or so from the side wall. Measuring 12 feet from the center of their postmold put us into the zigzag ditch that I had been excavating and working to clean up in the beginning of the week. I was not down to subsoil yet, but even before we took out the rest of the ditch fill, we had reason to be excited. Cleaning around the west edge of the ditch revealed a very subtle soil discoloration that almost exactly matched the size of our test pit into the ditch (which made it hard to spot if you weren't already looking for it!) It really looked like the mottled fill we'd seen in the two intact postholes, and after Dave jumped in and blew away a lot of the ditch fill we had our proof. There was a fourth posthole, exactly where it should be, exactly 12 feet from the west corner of what we were now pretty sure was a wall. It even had a piece of Bermuda coral poking out - you can see the white top of it in the photo below.

Here is a photo after we'd cleaned up the posthole and mold quite a bit.

News that we'd found evidence of a pretty substantial structure that might match the dimensions of the 1608 church spread quickly. Within a half-hour, everyone was out in the heat and humidity - including the entire lab crew and all the volunteers!

The heat and humidity was wicked. At the visitor's center, this sign warned all of the guests to be careful and recognize symptoms of heat illness.

But it was the cartoon at the top which prompted a mini-field trip from our excavation. Jamie was laughing about it, so we all took a trip across the bridge to see it:

The text reads "Wee lost none but one Edward Brookes Gentleman, whose fat melted within him by the great heats and drought of the country." Awesome.

So there you have it - the reason I've held off posting for all these weeks. This find was really, really big news, and I didn't want to say anything to possibly steal the Jamestown crew's thunder. However, it's made the news in Virginia (here is the link: http://www.vagazette.com/articles/2010/08/21/news/doc4c6efa773adc3130253669.txt)

And within the last few days, a new post has appeared on the Historic Jamestowne website. (Click here: http://www.historicjamestowne.org/the_dig/) As I understand it, the staff has finished what was left on the east side of our excavation area, and I think they may have started to backfill that area. They have opened 2 or 3 more units on the west side, where they had plotted the next two postholes and molds. And, as you can see on the video, they found 'em, bringing the grand total up to six!!

(The next few photos have been gratefully and respectfully borrowed from the Historic Jamestowne site - thanks, guys!)

Before opening the new units, the staff enlisted some visitors' help and took a photo showing the area of the church. M.A., Dave, Jamie (?), Dan Smith, and Danny are in the excavated area forming the east wall and corners, and the visitors outside of the ropeline are making up the rest of the "walls". I am guessing this shot was taken from the top of the reconstructed church.

This is my favorite photo! It's an overview of the site, with everything clearly marked. Feature #2965 is the one I spent a lot of time working on - at the top of the photo and dead center in the east wall. 406 and 3017 are Alex's and M.A.'s, respectively. Feature 3000 was at the bottom of the zigzag ditch (if you look hard you can still see the coral - although you'll probably need to click over to http://www.historicjamestown.org/ for the high-resolution picture in order to see it!) Numbers 3039 and 3040 are the two new postholes and molds the staff has recently uncovered. "STR 188" is "Structure 188" abbreviated - in addition to the features which receive individual numbers, the features taken as a whole building receive a structure number.

You can also see five graves in the east end of the structure (features numbered 3042, 2993, 2992, 3046, and 170.) If this is the 1608 church (and they will need to complete the excavations to the west to prove that it is in fact 60 feet long and matches Strachey's dimensions), these five graves would be located directly under the chancel (the chancel is the space around the altar at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building, which was usually partitioned off so that only clergy would have access to it.) The really interesting thing is that the church crypt was often located under the apse or the chancel at the east end of the church - exactly where we have five burials closely oriented to the church walls!!

However, the best thing on the Historic Jamestowne site - in my mind - is this:

It is the updated map of the site. Near the center, showing the six postholes found and the predicted dimensions of the rest of the structure, they have plotted in the church.

The thing is this - more than any artifact, more than anything else this summer, I was hoping we would find some really cool feature. Something big, something important, something that might add something new to the history of James Fort as we know it. I wanted to help put something on the map.

This surpassed all my wildest hopes and expectations!

"A dreadful storm and hideous . . . " *

Today I learned just how nice we had it in Field School - morning and afternoon breaks, freezy-pops, cold water always on site . . . It seemed mighty empty today with just 4 or 5 of us, and trying to open the site while the wind blew the tarps every which way was interesting! I realized also how nice the staff had been to let us dig features all last week when several portions of the site are still undefined because they are not down to subsoil yet. Thanks, guys!



We spent the early morning finishing up the waterscreening that had not been completed Friday afternoon. With so many of us digging features, the folks waterscreening were overwhelmed, and at least a dozen buckets were left to finish. Waterscreening is muddy and splashy and dirty, but it was hard to mind when I was already filthy from opening the sites - the minute the tarp was lifted it started to billow in the strong wind, throwing mud and muddy water all over us. A few splashes as we waterscreened seemed pretty tame by comparison. :)



When we finished up, we returned to the site. Dave postponed any work on my feature from last week until Dr. Kelso and Danny had returned. Instead, he sent me to the northwest corner of the open excavation to work on the tests into the snake-fence ditch that zigs and zags through the whole western end of the site. You can clearly see how it bends in this photograph. I mostly worked on cleaning up the sidewalls of the test pit on the bottom in the photo.

After lunch we came out to find dark, angry clouds barreling down the river towards Jamestown Island. We scrambled to close the site - luckily the wind had died down a bit - and ran for the cover of Yeardley house before the rains came. The storm was short-lived, and we were able to come back to the site by about 2:30. After reopening, we dug until the end of the day. My most remarkable find of the afternoon was a piece of small lead shot, about the size of a pomegranate seed, in the screen.


As we began to clean up and close the site, the sky suddenly went from sunny to dark. There was a huge, menacing cloud right above us, and just as we started to pull the tarp there was a gigantic flash of lightning and crash of thunder. We started to really scramble then, getting the tarp and sandbags in place just as the large drops began to fall! We dashed back to the shed just in time to get all our equiptment inside, and then the rain really started.


All 5 of us - Dan Smith, Mary Anna, Michael Ligman, Dave and I - jumped on the Gator and Dave floored it for Yeardley house. Even in the short time it took us to go from the tool shed to the house, we got completely soaked while all around us there was lightning and thunder constantly (a few strikes seemed pretty close, too!) Of course we were fine (although I don't think Dave likes to be wet. He was walking around with his shoulders hunched like a cat that's fallen in a pond!) It certainly made for an exciting end to the day!

Driving the Colonial Parkway back to Williamsburg was an otherworldly experience - there was mist coming off the parkway itself and drifting into the surrounding trees. I felt like if I stopped and got out, I might find myself in Brigadoon!


* ". . . the clouds gathering thick upon us, and the winds singing and whistling most unusually . . . a dreadful storm and hideous began to blow . .

It could not be said to rain. The waters like whole rivers did flood the air . . . "

- William Strachey, "A True Reportory, Pt. 1"

Jamestown Narratives, edited by Edward Wright Haile

Procrastination . . .

Hi all. Sorry to be so late with Friday's post - I will do my best to have it up this evening.

For those of you who have been faithful readers, thank you! Field school has ended, but I am staying here another week to volunteer, and I will do my best to keep posting this week. With any luck, I'll learn a little more about this feature of mine, even if we don't make it all the way to subsoil by Friday!

Last Day of Field School Proper

We began Friday morning with a 2-hour lecture from Dave on geographic information systems (GIS) and cultural resource management (CRM.) The various forms of GIS allow archaeologists to represent, manipulate and interpret both geographic and archaeological information - in other words, we can accurately map features on the landscape, the layers of soil deposition within the features, and the exact point at which each artifact is found within the features. It is even possible to export the data to special software that will allow you to map features (like pits, cellars and wells) in 3-D, or to re-create virtual structures on the landscape based on the archaeological data. Pretty spectacularly cool stuff!


(Click here to see the earlier excavations mapped onto the Jamestown Island landscape:
http://www.preservationvirginia.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=18)


CRM is also of huge importance to us as future archaeologists, as odds are good that at some point most of us will work for a CRM agency. CRM is sometimes called "salvage" or "rescue" archaeology, as it is these agencies who are called in ahead of the bulldozers on a construction project (or sometimes - unfortunately - because of the bulldozers on a construction project.) CRM agencies are contracted to come onto a site and survey it for possible archaeological significance. This begins with a Phase I survey, which includes documentary research on the area of potential effect (if any information can be found) and pedestrian survey (literally walking around picking things up from off the ground). If it seems the site might have archaeological value, the CRM agency would move into Phase II to determine the site's eligibility. This might include shovel test pits (digging a series of holes laid out on a grid system and screening for artifacts) and/or some test units. Based on the findings from these initial surveys, a decision will be made on whether the site has archaeological value and should be excavated and mitigated before the continuation of the project, or whether the project can continue without any further excavation and salvage of the site. In rare cases, if a site has huge potential signifigance, a project might be stopped outright.


CRM agencies are largely contracted by federal agencies, as the National Historic Preservation Act (1966) made it law that any federal project first requires a survey of the area of potential effect in consideration for the National Register of Historic Landmarks. Unfortunately, it does not apply to private landowners, who can build at will in most areas. Some states and/or counties - James City County, home to Jamestown, for example - have a strong sense of their local history and have laws in place for private land as well, but in many other places construction projects can take place at the landowner's whim, regardless of what might be destroyed in the process. When I volunteered in Maryland, I created a predictive model of 18th- and 19th-century sites along the Chester River, and when we field tested the model we found most waterfront sites with brand-spanking-new houses sitting right on top of what might have been an archaeological treasure . . .


To be fair, if the site is not registered, the landowner can not possibly know there is anything of archaeological value on their property. And even if the site is registered, the information is not likely to be made public for fear that pothunters will come along to take whatever they can find that looks valuable and saleable (or, I suppose, that the property owner might do the same). It's a fine line to walk. (Click here for an article from British Columbia, Canada, where they have a Heritage Conservation Act in place affecting private landowners, but also charging them for the archaeological survey: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/19/bc-diggingbill.html. I would recommend you read with a grain of salt, as I'm not sure I trust the CBC's statement that "We hold the powers that be accountable." The article may be fairly biased against the BC government, and certainly sounds terrifically biased against the archaeologists involved!)


Of course, many Nationally Registered Historic Landmarks - managed by the federal government or local non-profit agencies - are falling into disrepair or are on the brink of financial ruin, especially in our current economy. Several have been sold to private owners or closed for lack of funding. Many others struggle to pay the salaries of their employees, who research and interpret for the public the history and importance of the site. It is unfortunate that our history as a nation is slipping away unremarked and unlamented.
(http://www.historicjamestowne.org/donate/)


After the lecture, we went back to the field. As you may recall, at the end of Thursday we had discovered a subsoil ledge on the east side of the feature and a dark soil layer covering the rest of
it (giving it similar dimensions to the feature a few feet to the north.) Dr. Kelso and Dave are now guessing (given that dark layer that looks for all the world like a layer of decomposed organic material) that this may be a saw pit, used by the early colonists to cut lumber.

The colonists would have been using a two-person saw. One person (the "top dog" would stand above the log, and the other (you guessed it - the "underdog") stood in the pit below. The underdog had the lousier job, as all the sawdust would fall down into his face.

We also had a very obvious posthole, with a dark postmold right in the center. It looks as though that postmold is actually charcoal - as if the post had burnt in place. Dr. Kelso pointed out that there is some documentary evidence to support the idea that the colonists might have burnt the end of the post in an effort to retard decay.





Just like the earlier hole I excavated mid-week, this posthole seems full of artifacts. Earlier in the day I found a turquoise-blue trade bead that was sort of kidney- or half-moon-shaped. I also found a few escutcheons for brigandine armor (below). Escutcheons were decorative items - in this case, they were used to decorate the rivets holding the metal plates to fabric or leather. Unfortunately they are very fragile, and the first one broke as we examined it.








As I cleaned up the posthole a bit for our last walkabout, I hit an interesting metal item. It is impossible to tell for sure what it might be, as it is still largely buried, but Dave guessed that it might be part of a sword or other weapon - perhaps the trigger guard or snaphaunce from a gun?

We cleaned up the site and closed right after walkabout - with me waist-deep in the feature and still not down to subsoil. :D

I miss my family tremendously, but I am also grateful to the them and to the Jamestown staff for giving me an extra week to dig, learn, and with any luck get to the bottom of this feature - literally!

A HUGE THANK YOU . . .

. . . TO THE COOLEST FIELD CREW EVER!!!!

The Penultimate Day, Some Mysteries Solved . . .

It was back into the mystery feature on Thursday. There is a lot we don't know about this feature, which is why we are testing down into it. It looks a little like a soldier pit according to Danny, but it has this funky shape:

It is not quite square and does not quite match the dimensions of a normal soldier pit. We are testing the area south of where the utility trench cut through, so roughly the bottom third of the above shape.

At one point, we thought we had solved the mystery of the hole I excavated yesterday. It looked a lot like a postmold (the area where a wooden post has rotted) but it was offset on the top of the feature and there was no associated post hole. Well, we believed today that we had found the post hole when an area of grayish clay showed up about 18" down, looking for all the world like it really wanted to belong to that darker hole fill. You can see the lighter clay in the bottom left corner of this photo:

The best way to see if a feature really is a feature is to keep excavating - if the soil stain remains it is a feature, but if it changes or disappears altogether it was just coincidence. Lo and behold, we had a really bizarre coincidence here, because that change in soil coloration petered out after about an inch. Had it been a post hole associated with the postmold, it would have continued at least to the bottom level of the hole.


So we can be pretty sure that whatever that intrusive hole was, it was probably not a postmold. We know, from the associated artifacts (trade beads, copper scraps, suspected brigandine armor pieces) that that hole was dug and filled in pretty early. Unfortunately, much of it was lost to the utility trenching in the 1930's, so we will probably never know the exact reason it was dug.


We also know that the entire feature is pretty early. There are very, very few historic artifacts in the fill, but there are lots of lithic flakes, fish scales, and fragments of Virginia Indian pottery. In the first few months that the colonists were here, that would have been the only type of artifact lying around that would have gotten mixed in with the fill, as the colonists would not have been here long enough to deposit a lot of material culture yet (unlike in the later years of the fort where by some accounts there was trash lying all over the place.) That in itself makes this a crazy-exciting feature to dig!!!


After troweling for a large part of the day, I dutifully took my turn water screening - and of course, while I was away they found another clue to our wonky feature. Troweling down, they came onto another layer of fill that was uniformly dark and loose, instead of the mottled clay we had been seeing most of the day. At the same time, the east side wall cut in sharply and bottomed out. It is hard to see the curvature of the bottom in this photo, but you can clearly see the abrupt change from dark, loamy soil to solid orange clay.

Our mystery feature is now a little less of a mystery - the dark area exactly matches the dimensions of similar features (soldier pits?) The east wall bows out because at some point someone dug in sideways toward the edge of the darker fill. That would probably help to explain the strange light fill over in that area that we thought might be a posthole. Unfortunately, with so much disturbance in this area from the utility trench, the fill was very hard to read as we troweled down through it.

I was disappointed that they figured out so much about our feature in the 45 minutes or so that I'd been water screening outside the fort walls. At the same time, I had a cool little discovery of my own. While screening some fill from Mary Anna's boundary ditch (right next door to our feature!) I found something that looked for all the world like a round rock. However, it had clearly been modified - incised around the equator, as it were.

I took it to Dave, who got about as excited as I've seen him so far. He said it was a Virginia Indian artifact - a piece of sandstone carved and incised to be used as a weight on a fishing net. How cool is that?!?!?