Happy Easter 2022 - SIAP Rises from its Long COVID slumber

 

Wild Easter Lillies

Smallpox Bay - The Mystery Deepens

It's been a rough two years for everybody everywhere, with COVID-induced precautions stopping travel, closing archives, parks, and museums, disrupting university teaching and student training, and all but stopping archaeological fieldwork.  Bermuda has suffered four successive waves of COVID flare-ups that produced nearly 13,000 cases - roughly one in every five residents. Its economy has been hard hit by the collapse of the tourism industry, and my beloved St. George's has particularly suffered closures, neglect, and stagnation.  Easter is a day of hope, and I am quietly optimistic that we are all emerging from the pandemic's shock to the world system and that Bermudians will bounce back (as they always have historically) from the recent crisis.

I am very fortunate to have weathered the COVID storm well and have even been remarkably productive. Stuck at home and with no archives or archaeology to distract me, I finished my second monograph on Bermuda's history, Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints: An Atlantic History of Bermuda, which is essentially a prequel to In the Eye of All Trade. Johns Hopkins University Press will publish it in June 2022. It tells the story of Bermuda's colonization entwined with Virginia and as a critical site of English experimentation with utopian religious ambitions and as a crucible where English, African, Iberian-African creole, and Native American people and cultures blended together to produce an early case of ethnogenesis - to create "Bermudians." 

During my COVID cloistering, I was also able to do some close analysis of past years' archaeology at Oven Site and Smallpox Bay using my 3D photogrammetry models and orthomosaics derived from them and ported into ArcGIS. I seized the chance to do some solo digging at Trunk Island and Smith's Island in April 2021 just as Bermuda was hit with its third and worst-yet wave of COVID, which closed down the entire island for a couple of weeks in lockdown. Working alone, outside, on uninhabited islands enabled me to excavate while still adhering to government mandates, and I was able to find a new, promising site at Trunk and expand units around the stone ruin at Smallpox Bay to uncover another 24 new post holes - more on this in a future post!

May testing recovered a considerable number of early 17th-century ceramics interspersed with late 18th and 19th-century material associated with the military occupation of the site. Further excavations at the 2014 "midden," discovered some distance from the stone ruin, revealed it to actually be a dense sheet refuse concentration rather than a discrete trash dump, and the additional two meter-square units dug yielded nearly as many ceramics as had been found across the rest of the site - and nearly half of which date to the 17th century. Extensive clearing of the forest south of the stone ruin exposed a flat area and strategic testing revealed several new post holes at some distance to the initial site's concentration, suggesting that there were multiple timber-framed earth-fast structures at this location.

Clearing - after

Clearing - before

The preponderance of early 17th-century material associated with a considerable array of post holes circumstantially fits the profile of what one would expect to find at the site of Governor Richard Moore's first, briefly occupied town planted on Smith's Island in July and August 1612, which was abandoned in favor of its more enduring location, the Town of St. George. 

David Givens, Jamestown Rediscovery Director of Archaeology,
holds a Bermuda limestone fragment found at James Fort which
 arrived on the Deliverance or Patience in 1610 (Photo by Charlotte Andrews)

In January 2022, I was awarded a University of Rochester Pump Primer II grant to fund a two-phase research campaign to conclusively identify the Smallpox Bay peninsula as the site of the 1612 Moore's Town. Phase I commences this week.  I was fortunate to secure the expert advice and considerable field experience of David Givens, Director of Archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery, and Peter Leach, Lead Archaeologist at Geophysical Survey Systems, Inc. (GSSI) to conduct the first extensive trial of ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology on Bermudian archaeological sites.  Dave and Peter have done GPR surveys on dozens of archaeological sites all over the world and have brought with them an array of equipment to field test at Trunk Island, Smith's Island, and at King's Square in St. George's.  

Our hope is that methodical closely spaced GRP surveying will produce highly detailed 3D data about subsurface strata, and particularly features cut into Bermuda's distinctive hard-crust bedrock. If this proves to be the case, GPR surveying will reveal the precise locations of numerous unexcavated post holes near the Smallpox Bay site to guide actual excavation later this summer. A GPR survey of King's Square promises to enable us for the first time to visualize the 17th and early 18th-century layout of the heart of the Olde Towne, which once featured an inlet and town dock (filled in by 1742) and a gun battery facing the harbour, by imaging strata, fill, and large objects through the asphalt paved surface of today. Best of all, GPR is non-destructive and minimally disruptive, yielding incredibly valuable, high-resolution data in a relatively short collection period (this week). So wish us luck, and check the SIAP blog for reports of our results!

And Phase II of the grant?  A resumption of SIAP fieldwork with a large team of trained archaeologists this July and early August. The best is yet to come!