Spring Break Archaeology in Bermuda!!!
Greetings from Bermuda! Tomorrow, twenty students taking my University of Rochester Historical Archaeology and my Digital History: Building a Virtual St. George's will arrive to start a very full week of digging, digital modeling, exploring, researching in the archives, and generally learning about Bermudian and Atlantic history using this wonderful island as our classroom.
I am holding my breath and hoping that the snowstorm predicted for Ontario and Western New York will fizzle and not derail anyone's travel but things look good so far. Once we are all settled at Paget Island, we will set up to conduct excavations in the cellar of Bermuda National Trust's Globe Hotel - a mansion built in 1699-1700 as the governor's residence. The testing is a practicum for students to apply the abstract knowledge they've learned over the past six weeks in the classroom, as well as a window into how the building was constructed: was this unusual two-room-wide house built as is, all at once, or was it a more typical house that was doubled in size?
The units will also hopefully contain a succession of earthen floors that were living and working spaces occupied by enslaved household members - many of whom are well documented in probate inventories, wills, and Bermuda's 1820s Slave Registers.
I am also hoping for good weather for my VSG (Virtual St. George's) students. They have each spent the past month researching a particular St. George's address/property, and now they will be "meeting" their research topic. They will be taking A LOT of pictures of their houses to build 3D photogrammetry and digital models of them after break back in Rochester. I hope they will find it cool to see the place where their various historical research subjects lived their lives. And if it rains, they can go to the Bermuda Archive in Hamilton and work with original 18th- and 19th-century records unavailable in Rochester to take their house stories further.
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