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Field School 2017 – Week 4
Kathleen Weber — Salisbury University
“(Re)Discovering the Foundation”
The week’s rainy weather meant that some days started with bailing the water from our excavation units
This week at field school we continued our work of excavating around the Calvert House.
Fellow field school student Ralph and I unbackfilled a gravel drainage area that ran along the front wall of the home (this was installed when this area was initially excavated in the early 1980s). As we continued to dig deeper, my partner Ralph and I found what we presumed was an earlier walkway to the front doorway to the Calvert House, but this turned out to be a reconstruction of a stone step that led into the house’s eastern doorway.
Field school students Flannery Lawrence and Alexa Olivares pointing to brick bats in a layer of late 19th-/early 20th-century construction refuse
Flannery Lawrence is kneeling on the reconstructed brick foundation of the Calvert House, which was placed directly on the original 17th-century foundation when the reconstruction was installed. The lowest course of darker bricks visible immediately above the surface of the excavated unit below Flannery is a portion of the 17th-century foundation.
Bone die removed from a 19th-century deposit near the east wall of the Calvert House
My fellow crew mates Alexa and Flannery found a bone die while trowel-cleaning the unit next to us. Earlier in the week, Madeline and I found a 6,000 year old projectile point. It has been an exciting week at the Historic St. Mary’s City field school!
Field school student Cormac Morrish carefully excavating around a mandible
We took our midterm this week. The HSMC field school has given me the opportunity to study colonial and post-colonial artifacts hands-on multiple times.
We were given study time to become far more educated about the artifacts we would be digging up in the near future. I feel as though this extra time provided for us to study hands-on has given me and my peers the chance to excel here at St. Mary’s. As the weeks go on we will learn to perform a more advanced methods of archaeology.