Trunk Island Invasion!

Forgive me, Smiths Island!  I am not forsaking you!

Tomorrow we begin a week-long mini-field school in partnership with the Bermuda Zoological Society to assess archaeological sites on Trunk Island in Harrington Sound. This project has been a long time in development and is now about to actually happen, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Ian Walker of BZS and the University of Rochester's Center for Community Leadership. Last summer, Ian took me to Trunk to explain their ambitious project to restore the island to its pre-human-arrival state so it can serve as a living natural history museum and research center - much like Nonsuch Island but far easier to reach. In tearing out invasive species, however, Ian and his volunteers became concerned that they might be damaging archaeological sites dating from the past four hundred years, so contacted me to explore doing an assessment - basically doing for seven-acre Trunk what we've been doing on sixty-acre Smiths Island. 

Enter the RCCL. The University of Rochester is increasingly committed to promoting community-engaged learning, sharing the expertise of its faculty and research resources with local and global community partners who can benefit from collaboration - and it makes grants to support these partnerships when they become a central component of a college course. So this year's HIS 280 Archaeology of Early America course has as its central focus a Spring Break Archaeology survey, in which students will put into practice the abstract skills they've been learning up to this point. All four of them...

... which further led me to use this opportunity for a SIAP reunion. Veteran diggers Leigh, Alice, Xander, and Katrina apparently have nothing better to do (or were too polite to say no) than search for sites with me and help us identify human activity sites for the BZS to prevent their future disturbance. And as the world plunges into Coronavirus Chaos, I can think of no better place to hunker down than a new very-old-island and share the thrill of finding and studying new sites alongside old and new digging buddies.

Out of the Closet

I am also very excited to try out some new tech in Bermuda - a magnetometer that I found gathering dust in a colleague's closet over the past five or so years.  It's taken a couple of weeks to track down the right missing cables and rig up a new battery pack, but it should be operational. Using a Mag hasn't been an option on Smiths Island because it is so heavily overgrown, but the southern portion of Trunk Island is substantially cleared - and this clearing lines up with the placement of a house on Richard Norwood's 1663 survey! A house at this time would almost certainly have been timber-framed and left little more than posts set into bedrock - deeply buried and thus hard to find - but a magnetometer should be able to pick up subterranean iron artifacts and heat-altered features. This will, I believe, be the first time a magnetometer has been deployed ON LAND in Bermuda (plenty have been used to detect shipwrecks), so we are not sure how it will perform.  But we'll know in the next few days!

The project will run from Saturday the 7th through Sunday the 15th. Any Bermudians who are interested in volunteering for at least two days should please contact me (michael.jarvis@rochester.edu) or Ian Walker at BZS/BAZM. Please pray for dry weather, since we only have one week to cover and assess the whole island (or as much as we can in the time we have).