As the start of a multi-year project to locate and study archaeological sites from the Plymouth Colony period (1620-1691), the Fiske Center is conducting six weeks of fieldwork this summer.  We began with a week of ground penetrating radar survey conducted by Drs. John Steinberg and Brian Damiata and are now in the middle of five weeks of excavation carried out by a UMass Boston field school, supervised by Drs. David Landon and Christa Beranek.  Our project is being assisted by Plimoth Plantation, and the staff there have shown the students both Native and Euro-American artifact collections on some of our rain days.

The excavations are taking place along Spring Lane; the first piece of land is on open lot near Jenney Pond.  There was a tannery on the parcel in the 18^th century and residences there until the mid-20^th century that were demolished during urban renewal projects.  We have been able to layer 19^th-century maps over modern air photos and our excavation grid so that we can relate our excavation units to the more recent structures.

We are excavating 50 by 50 cm shovel test pits (STPs) at 5 meter intervals across the property.  This is a common first step to learn about the history of the landscape and to locate areas that have been disturbed by more recent demolition activities and areas that have better preservation.  What we are finding is that despite the “natural” appearance of the lot, the topography has been radically shaped by people, especially in the 19^th century.  In places, we have 120 cm (about 4 feet) of fill, and the bottom layers still date to the mid-19^th or even the early 20^th century.  In other places the subsoil is just 40 or 50 cm below the surface, but there the stratified deposits are no older than the 19^th century.  This suggests that much of the lot has been subject to both cutting and filling and had been particularly intensively reshaped in the 19^th century.  Instead of the gentle slope to the water visible today, the lot may have sloped much more sharply to the pond or been terraced like the yards behind the houses across Spring Lane.

One of the perplexing problems is that we have reached the depth that we can safely and practically excavate in many test pits without reaching sterile deposits, so we don’t know what the fill is resting on.  Over the next few days, we plan to experiment with a coring device to see if we can answer this question.