Sadness and Woe for Summer 2018

I am sorry to have to report that there will be no Smiths Island Archaeology field school this summer. This is largely due to our inability to secure affordable accommodations in or near St. George's to house the staff and students, despite the multiple valiant efforts all spring of various friends of the SIAP.  Instead, I will be shifting my energies across the pond to our other UR field school based at Cape Coast in Ghana, where I'll be lecturing on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Portuguese, Dutch, and British activities on the Gold Coast, as well as teaching and supervising laser scanning, photogrammetry and ethnographic research in and around Elmina Castle along with University of Ghana faculty. I won't be entirely alone though - Ewan from the 2017 Bermuda dig will be taking up this new digital archaeology work as well.

We hope next year to reposition the field school back to July and early August, which will make participation available to UK students as well as to secure reliable accommodations. I guess we will all have to wait another year to see what those five new sites at Smiths Island's west end will reveal, as well as seeing if we can firmly attribute the large cluster of post holes at Smallpox Bay to Governor Richard Moore's brief 1612 town  -  and find the hypothesized Captain's House near the Oven Site kitchen site.