Stories from the Lab - Taylor Brown
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| An assortment of ceramics excavated from a single context at Small Pox Bay |
This season, thousands of artifacts arrived in
the lab, all to be washed, dried, identified, inventoried and prepared for long
term storage. Fragments of ceramic, glass, iron, kaolin clay pipes, animal
bones, bricks, daub, and more–each a single piece in the massive puzzle that is
the history of Smith’s Island and Bermuda as a whole.
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| A jet button |
As you sit washing artifacts one by one with a toothbrush, it’s hard not to imagine what kind of lives these objects lived before they arrived in your hands. Upon whose shelves did they sit? Whose bodies did they adorn? Whose homes did they fill? Who was proud of their purchase? Who was saddened by their loss? What paths did they travel to wind up on this little island in the middle of the Atlantic?
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| A copper-alloy key- I imagine someone was upset to have lost it |
What stories did they bear witness to? A harrowing shipwreck? A deadly smallpox outbreak? A flourishing hydroponic farming operation? A well-known adage in archaeology reminds us: it’s not what you find, it’s what you find out. So, as we found these ceramic sherds, these cut iron nails, these fragments of daub, these lost buttons—we pushed ourselves to find out much more - the "search" in Research.
Regimental buttons recovered this season:
Sappers & Miners, 42nd, 20th (an officer's button), 29th
and Royal Artillery
There were soldiers here, sent to the far flung reaches of Bermuda to escape a deadly disease (social distancing before they had the 21st-century vocabulary for it). Imagine them sitting and smoking their clay tobacco pipes, gazing across the harbor to where their comrades lay sick and dying. Absentmindedly fiddling with the loose button on their coat, until one day the thread snapped and it rolled away.
There were children
living on this island—shooting marbles, playing with toy cannon and clay
figurines, learning how to read and write with slate pencils, growing up on an
island midway between the “New World” and the “Old.” Imagine the raucous
shouts of kids at play—the laughter, the small voices, the skinned knees and
wide bright eyes. Two
marked marble - one made of clay, the other of stone
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| The tip of a slate pencil (left) and a copper-alloy toy cannon barrel |
There was once a structure here—a home, perhaps one of the earliest on the island—woven of vegetation and sealed with daub. Imagine creating this mixture from the native limestone, pressing it against the wattle, waiting for it to harden and solidify into something sturdy and true. Something that was eventually destroyed to make room for new homes and then dug up hundreds of years later. Something that would lead us to ponder the past we washed each piece of daub with our toothbrushes. Whose hands had pressed this into place centuries before it arrived in mine?
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| All the daub from one context, drying after being washed |
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| A marked piece of daub - perhaps 400-year-old graffiti? |
Every artifact has a story, one that can be gently teased out like an artifact is teased out of the ground. It’s these stories–these people–my mind wanders to as my fingers turn wrinkly in the lab’s washing basins. As I sit and count each piece of bone, each shard of window glass, each rusted nail fragment recovered throughout the season. As I seal the plastic bags meant to keep these stories safe until the next archaeologist comes along and wants to hold them in their hands and give them a listen.
Each context's artifacts are classified, inventoried, entered into a master database, and archivedSo although you may ask an archaeologist “What
did you find?” their answer will almost always explain what we found out—whose
stories we uncovered, whose tales the dirt revealed to us, whose lives we
imagined as we scraped our trowels over the soil, shook our screens, and washed
artifact after artifact in the lab.
A big thanks to all who spent hours bent over a wash basin, patiently scrubbing these little pieces of stories clean with me this summer in the new BNT Globe Museum lab. Your help and dedication was invaluable and now your own story is intertwined with those we have uncovered and will continue to uncover in the months and years ahead.
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