Finishing Up Fieldwork - The Dry(ish) Weeks (Ewan Shannon)

It takes a village: Hannah G., Aleksi, Dana (behind the bin lid), Becca, and Josh help to block out the sun as Keegan takes an opening context photo. Context photos need to have even lighting so we can accurately see the characteristics of the soil. 

Before we all scatter back to the places we call home and return to the joys of air- conditioning and cushioned chairs, I wanted to report the great achievements our team made this year. As we continued to uncover more features during our last two weeks, we expanded the excavated portion of our site by a considerable amount. By Backfill Friday- the day where we put our site to rest until next season by re-burying it- we had fully excavated 52 units. To put that into perspective, that’s 52 square meters of soil that was for the most part excavated one trowel- scrape at a time- no small feat! In total, we assigned and excavated 318 contexts this season (layers, features, and feature cuts within the 52 units). These numbers reflect the amount of hard work and diligence that the team brought to site every day, and my fellow supervisors and I are grateful for everything they put into this precipitation-challenged season.

A sample of Bermudian daub,
with imprints of interior wattle clearly visible

The significance of all these contexts lies in what they contain, and what larger picture of the site they paint when understood alongside each other. As we switched our focus from excavating layers within units to the features lying beneath those layers, we uncovered information that significantly developed our interpretation of 17th-century human activity at Smallpox Bay. Our Bermudian daub, which made its grand appearance in our large Locus A “pit” feature, was also recovered from within the fill of a few nearby post holes. This suggests that the postholes and the “pit” are associated and contemporaneous, since both were likely filled with daub pieces following the dismantling or demolition of the same earlier structure(s) that these daub walls came from, which we date to the last decade of the 17th century.

As often happens, some of the most interesting developments occur near the very end, and it was no different this year. On our last day of excavating features, Aleksi pulled something very interesting out of a post hole he was working on - a copper-alloy rod with a collar and flared terminal end. Understandably excited and a little confused, Aleksi immediately came over to me to inquire about what he’d found. To me, it looked a lot like the handle end of a fire stoker. Dr. Jarvis thinks that it may have been a pestle, or perhaps gained a second life as a pestle after breaking off an unidentified tool.

Our re-framing of prior years’ discoveries at Smallpox Bay didn’t end there. Our Bermudian daub also made us pause and reconsider the prevalence of mortar on our site- just as in prior years where we may have overlooked any possible daub, thinking it was mortar, perhaps we also overlooked any large spreads of mortar as merely very powdery bedrock. If we are in fact seeing the bedrock altered with applications of mortar, that in turn could develop our interpretation of the widespread toolmarks we’ve found in the bedrock. Perhaps these marks are not a byproduct of hoes cutting deep to churn the above soil, but instead evidence of intentional topography leveling. Considering these two possibilities together, this all could be evidence of early, large- scale transformations to the landscape. If that’s the case, a question that naturally follows is “why would they have done that?”.

 

Dana uncovering bedrock in his unit. Note the linear cut marks in the bedrock to the left of him, and a rectangular mortar “cap” in the bottom of the frame

This is just one of the many questions we hope to use to frame future years’ work on Smith’s Island. This year was an excellent one for seeing how our understanding of a site can develop so much in only a field season, and understanding that it’s a good sign if our prior interpretation is challenged to grow by our new discoveries. A few days before the end of the field season, I called a friend to tell him about our discoveries, and what our findings meant for next year. He was surprised that we were going to be returning. “If you’re so certain you found Bermuda’s first town, then why keep digging?” he asked. “What’s the point if you’ve already found what you were looking for?”.

            Archaeology is a dialogue between us and the past. It’s a dialogue that changes as it continues, as any good dialogue should. Aside from the fact that our work is far from over in terms of determining the full scale and layout of Moore’s first town, to state as a rigid fact that anything we discovered must be such-and-such only closes doors for ourselves and for any future archaeologists that study this site. The point of a dialogue, afterall, is to walk away from it with a better understanding of what both sides have to say. What does the past have to tell us that history did not record? Finding what we’re looking for is only part of it; it’s the things that we would have never expected to find that keep us coming back. On site, every question answered leads to more questions, and further opportunities to fill the gaps in the historical record. 

 

Our hand-drawn "working" map of this year’s new features,
 appended onto a GIS map of the site from last year.

Thanks to the hard work of this year’s team members and volunteers, undertaken in record-breaking downpours and sweltering summer humidity, we have a better understanding of the project’s goals and of Smallpox Bay’s larger significance in Bermudian and early English colonial history. We keep digging to better understand the social, material, and spatial realities of early Bermuda. Just as we have come away from this season with some major questions answered about building techniques and occupation demographics, we have that much more still to find out.

The very first pieces of daub appear as Mike and Hannah C. excavate the Locus A pit. See if you can spot the big iron key (hint: it’s next to the whale bone). 

Mike and a lizard friend. I see a Ratatouille spinoff in the near future.

Mike is probably violating a dozen OSHA regulations to get these closing shots.

The Backfill Friday Team. From left to right (top): Flo, Hannah C., Ewan, Kaspar, Becca, Skylar, and Keegan. (bottom): Aleksi, Josh, Mike, and Tristan.

Ewan is a University of Rochester alumnus currently pursuing his master’s in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. His thesis focuses on interpreting and digitally preserving 19th century chalk graffiti at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, New York. He enjoys Red Stripe, pistachio ice cream, and speaking in various weird voices to entertain himself and others on site. 

Yours truly on a particularly rainy day. I might not have stayed dry, but at least the paperwork did!