The Lexington Minuteman ran a story today about our recent finds including a photograph of one of the shoes and some of the matching buttons. We found five of these buttons with a sunburst design last week and another one today while excavating more of the same deposit.
See the Minuteman story at:
July 28, 2010 at 7:02 PM
Why is the dig ending in July if construction doesn’t start until September. Would be great to see what else is underground.
July 29, 2010 at 6:35 AM
In reply to Linda’s comment: One reason the dig is ending in July is that we need to allow time to process and write up everything that we’ve found. General estimates say that every hour in the field leads to 3 to 5 hours of work in the lab. Since we’ve had 6 people working 40 hours a week in the field, that adds up to a lot of lab work! (We’ll do a later post about what that lab work entails.)
The other reason that the excavation is ending now is that we have excavated about 50% of the area to be affected by construction, and so have gotten a good sample. We know about as much about the ell area as we are likely to. If we excavated more, we would probably collect more artifacts, but not learn that much more that is new or different about the area. Plus, a lot of the area that we did not excavate is full of modern plumbing!