Spring Break 2024 Research Slam!

 

Good Omens for 2024

It's hard to believe only a year ago I had taken two different University of Rochester classes to Bermuda for Spring Break 2023 to both excavate within the cellar of the Globe Museum AND photogrammetrically capture and 3D model a dozen historic St. George's houses. Although highly successful on both fronts, I swore at the time that this was biting off more than I could chew, too exhausting, and not to be repeated...

...but I also have a terrible memory, poor impulse control when cool new research beckons, and strong compulsion when the stars align and I have new tech to try out.  

This year's Spring Break packed about a month of work into eight days, and was enormously successful largely thanks to a whole host of incredibly generous Bermudian supporters and to my trusty archaeology sidekick, Ewan Shannon. The work was both forward-looking (preparing for the coming field season in May and June) and tying up loose ends from previous seasons' data collection. 

We also branched out into a new avenue of research on the technical structural and material characteristics of early Bermudian building methods and elements by working with University of Rochester Mechanical Engineering students, who are analyzing the makeup of Bermudian limestone, sand, clay, quicklime, mortar, and the early 17th-century daub (timber-frame wall covering) we discovered last summer in a 1690s pit at Smallpox Bay.

Ground Penetrating Radar

Having just acquired this through US NEH match funding and US and Bermudian donor gifts, I was itching to try this out myself after seeing GSSI's Peter Leach and Historic Jamestowne's David Givens survey St. George's and Trunk Island sites in April 2022. The kit is small enough to bring in carry-on and checked luggage on planes and with BAMZ help we obtained temporary customs clearance, borrowed their whaler, and was reconnoitering Smith's Island survey sites the day after arriving. 

With help from DENR to ensure no native plants were harmed in vegetation clearing, Ewan, Flo, and I cleared two substantial areas adjoining past excavation areas at Smallpox Bay and Oven Site and by Sunday evening had both surveys in the bag (or rather, the laptop), with great results!  This was fortunate, since gale-force winds developed from Monday onward and it proved impossible to return for more surveying. But what we did accomplish proved GPR is an incredibly valuable new tool and will work very well to guide this summer's new work.

It's the Little Things that Count (and need counting)

On Monday, Ewan and I divided and conquered our research "to do" list by splitting up.  Ewan worked with a wonderfully large group of Bermudian volunteers at Waterville identifying, sorting, counting, and inventorying artifacts recovered in previous years' excavations at Cottonhole Bight, Cave Site, and Smallpox Bay in order to fill in missing data in the SIAP master database of all archaeology since 2010.  While counting the number of flat and curved pieces of clear glass or quantity of bones in a particular layer may seem boring or pointless at first glance, they become hugely important when tied to GIS and statistical spatial analyses and mapped across sites.  Concentrations of clear flat glass, for instance, can reveal the positioning of a long-gone building and where a window once was along a wall.  Bone concentrations in layers suggest cooking or food processing areas, and datable artifacts found associated with them can reveal occupants' diet (and the marine and land environments exploited for food) in a particular decade or century. 

 Daub fragments!!!

All those little artifacts add up to big insights into past lives, once leveraged with computational tools. Thanks to Andy, Ashley, Rachael, Nicole, Daniel, TK, Malachi, and Oona, among others, who showed up early and often to help process the contexts, BNT Volunteer Coordinator Jeanie who acted as air traffic controller in keeping us from having too many or too few volunteers, Anna for connecting us with Bermudian students who helped research their own past, and especially BNT Cultural Heritage Officer Charlotte, who hosted and organized the volunteering and connected the Globe Archaeology Lab with Waterville as research sites.

Quicklime and Mortar and Daub, oh my!

While Ewan worked with BNT volunteers, I collected UR Mech E students Charlie and Will at the airport and began a crash course under the patient mentoring of Larry Mills, a highly esteemed expert on traditional Bermudian building practices. Over the next two days, we learned about "sharp", "fat", and "dead" sand, the incredible variety of Bermudian limestone (ranging from barely more than spongy sand to iron-hard ringing Walsingham rock), the properties of ash and red clay (ancient dust blown in from Sahara sandstorms), how limekilns were created, filled, and fired, quicklime slaking and storage, and different potential recipies for daub and mortar and their uses in timber and stone buildings and roof slating ("peanut butter" in Larry's phrasing), and how modern Bermudian building material is materially poorer than what craftsmen have historically worked with due to dwindling supplies of traditional material, depleted by rampant recent construction. 

Diana Chudleigh and Ian Davidson allowed us to study old limekilns, quarries, and other ruins on their properties, while Jane Downing and Deborah Atwood at NMB facilitated (on very short notice, for which I am grateful!) examination of Gardener Cottage framing and stone material (a 1660s half-timber building that once stood near Southampton Princess, which the NMB dismantled and saved from destruction). Charlie, Will, and Larry debated material characteristics and mix ratios while I soaked in all that I could about how the bits of daub, mortar, quicklime nodules, and heat-altered limestone we routinely excavated came to be and reflected traditional craft methods used in long-vanished homes.  

When they left on Thursday, Charlie and Will were well-armed with hypotheses to test back in Rochester and (after export permission was obtained) with stone, daub, and mortar samples to crush up, analyze, and test for precise hardness, compaction, and shattering properties.  They are even going to produce quicklime from hard Bermuda stone, using a laboratory oven. Larry provided a Master Class on historical building in all its elements - without his guidance this research would have taken two weeks instead of two days.  Thanks also to Tom James and Diana for their insights into how early buildings were made, to Flo and Justin for hosting the students, and especially Will and Charlie and Katie for taking on an obscure research project far afield from typical modern concrete studies!

Loose Ends and New Beginnings

By the time Ewan and I flew home Saturday (after Diana's excellent talk and book launch at the Globe Museum), we had filled in nearly every data hole in our database for re-entry back in Rochester (where I keep a small army of "lab rats" busy entering artifact counts), two completed GPR surveys, SIAP artifacts returned to the Globe Lab, cleared areas on Smith's Island ready for excavation in May, an export permit and samples of daub, stone, and mortar to take back for analysis, and a very clear idea of how the upcoming season will unfold. Strong winds kept us from doing more GPR work at Smallpox Bay and a morning of intense rain on Thursday cancelled a planned GPR survey around Carter House (rain and wet soil absorbs GPR signals and gives poor survey data), but Carter House isn't going anywhere, thankfully, and we can do this work in May.

As I write this, the deadline for applications for the 2024 season has just closed. We have assembled a really diverse, strong team with an international mix of participants and talents - sixteen undergraduates, grad students, and professionals from six different US and UK universities.  They will be led by Ewan and Xander, each of whom will be running their own independent sites this summer (Smallpox Bay and Oven Site rebooted, respectively). 

Charlie, Will, and Katie are actively analyzing their Bermuda building material over in Hopeman and have begun mixing up different recipes to try to replicate how those first 1610s settlers made their daub - daub that, amazingly, had self-healing properties and endured for perhaps 60 years, when Chesapeake and Plymouth daub melted away within a decade or two.

Huge thanks to Annette and Adrian, Larry, Ian, Peter, Flo, and Charlotte for everything they did to make this short trip a success, and to the many individuals who helped in the process of obtaining my export permit! I couldn't have done it without you!

The next eight weeks are going to fly by, but stay tuned for more engineering analysis results!