I can figure out this site in. . . four squares

With limited time and help, this summer's investigations concentrated entirely on the western of the two foundations at West End Bay.  As such, it was important to place our meter-square units carefully to maximize our field data. Selecting the structure's southeastern corner was an obvious choice, to immediately give us a window into how the foundation was built and its relationship to the surrounding pre-construction stratigraphy - never mind the surprise of the four features cut into the bedrock.

This unit immediately revealed that the foundation was fairly recent and supported only a light building, since it was laid upon soil and not tied into the underlying bedrock.  Unfortunately, this meant that there was no helpful builder's trench to date its construction. But artifacts from the layer the foundation was built upon establish that its construction could be no earlier than the early 19th century, based on the most recent artifacts (transfer print earthenware) found in this context.




The underlying layer (Cxt 005) had a smattering of 18th-century ceramics, however, as well as a real surprise - several lithic flakes and a worked, pressure-flaked projectile point (arrowhead).  The material (light gray flint) was different from the white chert flakes found in abundance in the 17th-century floor of Oven Site half a mile to the east, but provides yet more evidence of Native Americans' presence on Smiths Island. Lithic flakes in this layer represent a variety of stone types, revealing that stone tool-making occurred on or near this site, using several different raw materials - likely gleaned from ballast stones discharged from sailing vessels that plied Atlantic sea lanes. From the 1670s on, Bermuda vessels were constant callers at almost all British Caribbean and North American ports, taking on ballast when departing with light-weight cargoes. A small trickle of ships from Great Britain also carried brown and light and dark gray flint cobbles as ballast (Jarvis 2010).



From this start, it logically followed to extend two units to the north to further gather material from this pre-construction layer, as well as to more precisely date the building, use, and abandonment of the site foundation. These units uncovered the buried eastern wall of the structure, which were also resting solely on soil. The contexts relating to both the periods when the house was standing and before it was built yielded very few artifacts - findings consistent with the area being covered while occupied and with the area being disturbed or cleared in the course of the building's construction. Bermuda limestone bedrock and a sterile layer of deep red clay loam underlies these human occupation layers.

Interior Features

We excavated three of the four features in the corner unit; the fourth, an oblong feature cut of uncertain length, extends south under the corner and cannot be excavated until completely exposed. The first posthole cut another feature just to the north and was thus excavated as the most recent. Under an initial limestone rubble cap, two large heavy fragments of a cast iron cauldron completely sealed the feature's lower fill, but no otherwise dateable artifacts were recovered.

Diggers standing in very deep features

Two other round features proved extremely regular and deep, measuring 60 cm and 70 cm - or almost longer than my arm fully extended. Despite looking very much like post holes, the utter lack of artifacts and building rubble within the fill lead us to conclude they are natural features predating settlement.

 The Yard Outside

Stratigraphy and the artifact profile of material found on either side of the structure's wall should logically be different. While units located inside a frame house sealed by a wooden floor should reflect their closed, covered state, layers outside the house should build up and abut the foundation's exterior and yield an abundance of material deposited during the building's occupation - "sheet refuse", composed of mostly small artifacts thrown out and trodden on by past residents. Larger artifacts, in most cases, was thrown away farther afield or deposited in trash pits or middens.

N12 N 11, the unit located outside the foundation immediately displayed a cluster of stones embedded within a layer reflecting deterioration after the building's abandonment, with artifacts dating to the 19th and early 20th century (spent bullet casings).  Underlying this layer and its post-occupation building rubble was a thick deposit with a rich array of mostly 18th-century material - which was extremely puzzling: it suggested either that the foundation was either older than the 19th-century artifacts (perhaps intrusive) found in the pre-construction interior layer to the west established, or that the foundation did in fact date to the 19th century but cut into yard layers that had built up around an earlier nearby site. This yard layer also included brick fragments, large fish and mammal bones, a few lithic flakes, several small pieces of flat clear glass (suggesting the house probably had a window on the eastern side), a clay marble, and hand-wrought nails, reflecting construction and maintenance.
The exterior pre-occupation surface layer underneath contained a similar rich array of solidly 18th-century artifacts, including many different ceramic types (Nottingham, Westerwald and Fulham stonewares; white saltglazed stoneware; plain, blue and white, and polychrome tin-glazed earthenware; Staffordshire slipware; Creamware).

 The absence of pearlware (TPQ 1775) suggests a date range of c. 1725-1770, but if the site was occupied by enslaved Bermudians who were mainly using older hand-me-down ceramics (as has commonly been found in Southeastern US sites) the material culture dating and actual residence span are perhaps out of sync.

 As was the case inside the foundation, bedrock and a very thick red soil layer underlaid the occupation layers and proved completely sterile. It was a bear to dig this undulating context, which revealed at least another four features cut into bedrock, but all of them are likely natural features long predating Bermuda's settlement.


No sooner had Xander "Peppersbane" Cook and I finished the last of context 15 than it was time to undo all our hard work and rebury the site to preserve it for future investigation - yet another Fill-In Friday.

Conclusions

Despite our short season, we succeeded in mapping two new sites at Smiths Island's Western Bay, identified three nearby areas probably associated with this pair of cabbins, and established an early 19th-century date for the western building - with the strong likelihood of a considerable earlier mid-18th-century occupation. Findings in our four units support the interpretation that a framed wooden house had sat atop the surviving foundation.The material evidence reflects that the residents' diet was rich and diverse, as indicated by large cut cow and fish bones.
West End Bay Site also provided further evidence of enslaved Native Americans living on Smiths Island and persisting into the 18th century, extending the initial findings of Captain Boaz Sharp's two Indian slave families living at Oven Site and making lithic tools there. While previous archaeology indicated the creation of stone tools, unit N 10 E 10 yielded an intact projectile point, albeit considerably worn.

Future research should involve consultation with geologists and American lithic specialists to determine the origins of the many different types of stone flakes recovered thus far on Smiths Island, as well as possibly regionally narrowing down the lithic techniques used in fashioning the recovered projectile point.

West End Bay promises to be a rich research site, shedding light on an entirely undocumented portion of Smiths Island and Bermuda's history. Future archaeology will hopefully yield clues about the use and occupants of this bay - quite possibly enslaved Bermudians of African and Native American descent, given the small size of the two house foundations. Was the unexplored eastern cottage contemporaneous with the
western cottage we excavated? What other sites nearby were associated with this small hamlet? How do these homes relate to a large limekiln and tarris cistern just to the east, or a large house foundation set atop a ridge to the south?  Future archaeology field schools, I hope, will provide some answers!

Nice as it was to dig alone, it will take a large team to really unearth all that West End Bay has to teach us.

 Thanks to Xander Cook and Fae Sapsford for help excavating (sorry, no t-shirts this year!), to the Welch family for welcoming me into their home and putting up with dirt tracks, to Ian Walker, Trevor, Nigel, David Wingate, and the BAZM for the loan of Rare Bird II  and excellent tours of Trunk Island, and to Bill Zuill, Deborah Atwood, and the BNT for use of the Reeve Court Lab and continued support of SIAP.