The Fiske Center Blog

Weblog for the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Thinking Through Sampling and Stratigraphy at SBFS

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Hi everyone,
Sorry about the lack of posts, your resident blogger has been under the weather. But I’m back now and ready to deliver the news from Hassanamesit Woods.

Last week our field school students worked to carry out our sampling strategy, set out by Dr. Mrozowski and Dr. Steinberg the week before. The following video is an explanation of that strategy that Dr. Mrozowski gave to the students on site:

Dennis Piechota, Fiske Center conservator and soils specialist, examines the stratigraphy underneath the northwest corner of the house.

We also worked to further refine our understanding of the house by excavating the northwest corner of the foundation. Rather than revealing the living floor underneath the rubble, we realized that the northwest corner was not part of the cellar. While the house footprint is clearly rectangular; the cellar is in the shape of an ell, with the northwest corner left standing and supporting a bed of stones. Discussions have settled on the idea that this standing corner may have served as a base for a chimney. The abundance of ash and charcoal in the northwest part of the cellar, as well as the presence of mortar in an other wise dry stacked stone foundation, seems to support this theory. This new finding has piqued our interest in vernacular stone architecture and we hope to have a more informative post on this topic soon. Thanks for following along!

By: Heather Law Pezzarossi

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