After some shovel test pits and a few rainy days, we have gotten going on our larger excavation units on Burial Hill in Plymouth, MA. We are continuing our work from last year along School Street, looking for places where 17th-century deposits might be preserved in a narrow strip of land between the historic burials and the foundations of buildings that used to front on School Street.
Dr. David Landon orienting the students to the site on Burial Hill.
This year we are testing the southern end of the street with several 1 x 2 meter excavation units. We have four which we started yesterday; all of them are still in progress and encountering cultural deposits of different ages. As we found last year, units that are quite close together have very different strata and artifact types.
One of the excavation units.
We have placed these units based on historic map data and on several weeks of intensive geophysical survey by Drs. John Steinberg and Brian Damiata. We will probably be working in this area for the next few weeks, so if you are in Plymouth, please stop by and visit!