The 2024 Season in Review - Smallpox Bay: The First Town Site

It is now September and we are all back at school or working various contract archaeology gigs around the world. The site and lab supervisors and I spent all of July producing a comprehensive report on our highly successful season, the discoveries we made, and future work ahead of us - and very fulfilling to see just how much we accomplished. My fantastic team of diggers, lab rats, and volunteers made this happen, so take a bow!

This is the first installment reporting on findings, beginning with Smallpox Bay. Additional posts for Oven Site, Lab Analysis, Preliminary Faunal Analysis,

 and an Underwater Survey of Smith's Sound 

will follow in the weeks to come.




Smallpox Bay- Ewan Shannon, Site Supervisor

This season, we expanded our working area of Smallpox Bay significantly. A total of 371 contexts were assigned and excavated across 95 meter-square units – an area nearly double that of the previous year. Alongside our professional crew, thirteen Bermudian volunteers each dedicated at least two days to excavation and contributed their invaluable work ethic and insights.

Smallpox Bay 2024 season excavations. New units are shown in blue

Field Season	Layers	Feature Fills	Feature Cuts	Total Contexts
2024	210	108	53	371
2023	104	118	88	310
2022	156	51	34	241
2021	21	20	22	63
2017	11	26	26	63
2015	10	8	9	27
2014	12	14	15	41
2013	5	3	0	8

Summary of Contexts assigned at Smallpox Bay 2013-2024. Feature fill totals exceed

feature cuts because in many cases they filled natural depressions and declivities.

This year was the second of two seasons funded through the US National Endowment for the Humanities Archaeology Fieldwork grant and the first to make use of the GSSI ground penetrating radar unit. The 2024 SIAP team was composed of 23 full-time archaeology interns, field technicians, and supervisors as well as specialists in lab and data management structural engineering, multispectral imaging, artifact photography, and faunal identification. The team included students and graduates from five US and three UK universities and employed two Bermudian archaeologists in leadership positions. This year’s team was the largest of any SIAP group.

Field recording and excavation methods adhered to established professional standards and are documented in Jarvis, Smith’s Island Archaeology Project Field and Lab Manual (Rochester, 2022). All contexts were manually documented descriptively with precise spatial measurements and photographed; the entirety of the Smallpox Bay and Oven sites were recorded photogrammetrically at several times during and at the conclusion of excavations to create high resolution 3D models and sub-cm resolution orthophotos for later study. All artifacts were inventoried and are currently being entered into the SIAP master database in the University of Rochester's Digital History & Archaeology Lab. Heidi Klein photographed particularly relevant diagnostic artifacts for later consultation. I am consulting with ceramics experts Richard Hemery, Bly Straube, and others to further research ambiguous and unusual finds. The 2024 field season ran from May 22 to June 28, with an additional ten days spent doing artifact processing and field data curation.

This season our main goal was to establish the outlines of at least two distinct early earth-fast post-hole structures, which we succeeded in doing. The first of these, a smaller building found in Locus B to the south of the standing ruin, is now defined and excavated in its entirety after the first two walls were identified in prior seasons. It measures 14 feet by 16 feet, including a small addition on the building's southern side - perhaps a chimney enclosure.


A second much larger structure has been identified in Locus A. With post holes spaced at three-foot center intervals delineating walls, this structure is much larger than we had anticipated finding at Moore’s Town. Measuring 16 feet by at least 28 feet, the southern, western, and northern walls have all been identified but the eastern wall remains to be found.

Two irregular double post holes in the south wall with slightly wider spacing may represent a doorway; if this doorway is symmetrically positioned, this would suggest the structure is 42 feet long. Post hole depths of 18 inches to 2 feet (not including depths cut through the since-eroded 1612 ground surface) suggest walls of a significant height, perhaps two stories or with a high roof.

These characteristics tentatively suggest that this structure was either a large warehouse or public meeting house and church, where Minister George Keith (who arrived on the Plough) would have held divine services. If this interpretation is correct - and extrapolating from the positioning of the 1608 church in the center of James Fort in Virginia - this structure is likely marks the center of Moore’s Town and can thereby help us discern the layout of the rest of the settlement in future field seasons. 

The discovery of a broken hoe blade this season also helped us definitively resolve a long-running hypothesis pertaining to the extensive array of regularly spaced parallel tool marks cut into the bedrock surface in previous seasons.

The hoe head we recovered exactly fits the tool mark dimensions, made when workers manually breaking up Bermudian soil for planting with hand hoes chipped into the bedrock surface methodically in parallel lines. This artifact establishes that the marks were agricultural and human-made as well as revealing at least one of the sorts of tools that early Bermudians used to clear and plant their fields. Variations in the direction and angle of the hoe marks further suggest that hand plowing was done at various times perhaps decades apart, or by different individuals working alongside each other at a single original clearing moment.

Archaeological evidence uncovered this season reveals that the Smallpox Bay peninsula was clearly the site of Governor Richard Moore’s first town. The large number of aligned postholes representing multiple structures, the recovery of hundreds of pieces of early 17th-century material, and the lack of any other documented 17th-century occupation of the area on Norwood’s 1616 and 1663 surveys make this conclusion inescapable. The identification of more than a hundred post holes further establishes that construction was on a larger and more complex scale than previously thought.

Tentative identification of the large, still incompletely excavated building as the town’s central meeting house will help guide future seasons’ focus radiating out from this central location in order to discern the first town’s layout. We know much about the layout of late 16th-century English plantations in Ireland; 1600s-1610s settlements in early Virginia at Jamestown, Flowerdew Hundred, Martin’s Hundred, and Governor’s Land; the 1607-1608 Popham Colony at Sagadahoc, Maine; and 1620s settlements at Avalon and Cupid’s Cove, Newfoundland, and Plymouth, Massachusetts. Built by men, women, and children on an island without an indigenous population, how might Bermuda’s first town resemble or differ from these other English colonial prototypes?

Site Supervisor Ewan Shannon, 

showing off his super-human strength