Archaeology at the Globe Museum, Part II

 So... What did we find?

A Challenge!

In my career as an archaeologist I have used a variety of trowels and shovels and sometimes teaspoons, popsicle sticks and even toothpicks when excavating fragile objects or burials - but never a sledgehammer. Yet that was the right tool for the job of "digging" the concrete floor beneath the flagstones in the northeast and northwest cellar rooms. My students were more than a little shocked, but some got quite into the work, especially the three who were delayed for two days by Delta Airlines in arriving...

We did not find concrete flooring in the porch or southwest room, however.  In the porch room, the exterior walls rested on hard-packed limestone that initially looked like bedrock but had just fused into a concretion to support the bottom-most course of blocks.  Under this was a compacted medium brown soil layer that was largely artifact-free, rather than the first in a succession of earthen floor surfaces that we had expected to find in such a heavily trafficked area (there were originally two exterior doors on the north and south walls, making this a central building axis point).  

Distinguished Historian Ruben Flores (my boss)

The fact that the foundation base is different here than in the other three areas strongly indicates that the porch was added to the Globe after its initial construction: a different crew using different building techniques. Successive layers of nearly artifact-free soil puzzled us immensely, leading to the interpretation that either during construction or in putting in the most recent floor, earlier accumulated floor surfaces had been stripped off to leave essentially the ground surface of circa 1699 when the Globe was built.  Clarice, Paola, Nora, and guest diggers Ruben and Andrew kept their spirits up with tunes, and their room became known as the Party Porch Pit.

The southwest room also lacked a solid floor but in this area there was evidence that one had been there but had been removed previously in an earlier renovation. It was here that we first discovered the unsettling fact that the Globe's original exterior walls were resting on dirt, rather than tied into bedrock in a builder's trench (as would be typical in colonial Virginia). Matt maintained a balk as a structural precaution and kept digging with the expectation of finding occupation layers, but as with the Porch these had apparently been stripped off.  Instead after considerable excavation he found a quite thick deposit of coarse beach sand - complete with large and small shells. We had in fact been in layers dating to c. 1612-1699 (no artifacts) and had reached a prehistoric period when the cove or inlet that predated King's Square had been nearby - close enough for storms to have washed sand into this now quite inland area.

All our hopes were now pinned on finding intact, sealed, and thus well-preserved earthen floor layers under the concrete flooring in the northeast and northwest rooms, but alas all-too-energetic 19th-century workers had similarly dug away previous strata when they put down the four- to five-inch-thick solid floor, a concretion of broken bricks, sandstone, Bermuda limestone, and mortar, with bone, bits of Chinese overglaze porcelain and hand-painted pearlware, shell, and molded green glass bottle sherds mixed in for good measure. We again found the Globe's exterior walls resting on soil, flush with the base of the concrete floor.  Skylar, Tara, and Keegan excavated a dark brown layer beneath the floor in hopes of finding traces of occupation - charcoal flecks likely connected with the large kitchen hearth in the room boded well for this - but the context proved largely sterile. A dramatic textbook-level soil transition occurred next as we revealed a light sandy loam layer - likely a ground surface in mid-seventeenth-century St. George's - but we ran out of time to dig any further.

The same scenario played out in the northwest room but with even more complicated stratigraphy to challenge Megan's interpretive skills. The Globe's western wall rested on a more sandy layer that sloped down toward the center of the room here, overlaid by a brown loamy layer that had a very odd, irregular whitish line running through it - which turned out to be a root cavity that had filled with fine chalky sediment. Below but parallel to this we uncovered two hard but thin edges perpendicular to the wall, which seem to be edges of a ditch or trough treated with a thin layer of mortar - all of which date to the construction of the Globe in circa 1699 or earlier. We recovered no datable artifacts, however, and ran out of time to excavate further.

One final surprise was in store for us in the Porch.  After digging through two fairly thick sterile loamy layers, the PPPs found a round feature - a cylindrical post hole some 40 cm deep that had been deliberately filled with three limestone rocks.  It proved to be our only feature and sadly lacked any other artifacts but its vertical positioning and creation not too long after this area had been a beach suggests that it is very old, perhaps dating to the first few decades of St. George's settlement.  If only there had been a Hog Penny at the bottom! 

We ended the week with a very busy Open House on Saturday, when a lot of St. Georgians stopped in to see our results. U.S. Consul Karen Grissette and her family also visited the site and talked about the benefits of Bermudian-American educational exchanges and partnerships. 

 A huge shout-out goes to Eleanor and Martin, my Number One volunteers, who spent the entire week inventorying finds from my 1996 Globe Hotel Garden excavation, which yielded far more artifacts that this week's dig! I'm also hugely grateful to Charlotte Andrews and the BNT (no picture, she was always moving too fast!) for opening up the Globe and facilitating the dig, to the Ministry of Education for organizing the visits of so many school children, Megan and Skylar for stepping up as site supervisors, Clarice for her numerous tours, Cameron for being a Good Sport, and Katie for essentially leading the Metashape fieldwork despite never having been to Bermuda. I am not thanking Keegan for his dad jokes or sea shanties. The whole experience would not have been possible without the help of Dr. Ian Walker and BAMZ - they made us legal with proper immigration permits and also lent us the Twin Vee, without which we would have been stranded on Paget Island most of the week! Somers Market's fantastic chefs kept us well fed with fish, chicken, peas and rice, mac and cheese, salads, cakes, and other goodies.  And finally the Bermuda Government's Youth, Sport and Recreation staff vitally made the whole project possible through making available the Paget Island camp, and Andre helped to make our stay comfortable despite the cool and stormy weather.

On Saturday as the students ventured forth to have a well-earned day off to make Spring Break memories, I reflected that pretty much everything I had expected to find was simply not there.   The Globe's foundations did not rest on bedrock and thus did not extend down far enough to discern how they joined together.  The porch room's different style of foundation bedding strongly suggests it was built asynchronously but there were no convenient datable artifacts to date its addition. Later floors also did not seal and preserve earlier floors as we expected, but rather effaced them - robbing us of the opportunity to recover material that would help us better understand the lives and activities of the four to six generations of enslaved Black Bermudians who called these cellar rooms home. This destruction was not deliberately done of course, but it nonetheless was very disappointing. I was struck by the utter lack of artifacts in most layers: the combined assemblage for the four units over the entire week would not fill a shoebox.  At least it saved us time washing and cataloging...

How did we fare during the midweek gales and what adventures did the Digital History crew get up to?  Find out in the next installment!