The Fiske Center Blog

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

Welcome to the 2016 season in Plymouth!

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Our 2016 field season in Plymouth is underway! We’ll have a few posts with details about the work soon; this post gives a quick overview of the project. You can also read updates from earlier years by looking at everything categorized under Plymouth (here).

View of Plimoth Plantation, a reconstruction based on the museum's best understanding of the appearance of the early 17th-century town.

View of Plimoth Plantation, a reconstruction based on the museum’s best understanding of the appearance of the early 17th-century town.

The approaching 400th anniversary (1620–2020) of the arrival of the Pilgrims and founding of the Plymouth Colony provides an opportunity to reexamine the region’s history and archaeology. Since 2013, Fiske Center archaeologists have been excavating in downtown Plymouth to try to locate any preserved remains of the 17th-century Plymouth Colony settlement. This project is a collaboration with Plimoth Plantation, and the summer research is run as an archaeological field school, with new and returning students comprising the field crew. Our goal is to add new information to our understanding of the Plymouth Colony, the colonists’ relations with Native Wampanoag people, and the growth and evolution of the Town of Plymouth.

Excavation in 2015.

Excavation in 2015.

We have been combining traditional archaeological excavation with geophysical survey techniques, mostly ground penetrating radar. The ground penetrating radar is used to map soil properties to help guide the digging and characterize broader areas than can be excavated. The excavation work that follows is a careful process of sifting for artifacts and mapping the soil levels to interpret the age and history of each section of the site. Despite its appearance as a small town today, the archaeology in Plymouth is very “urban,” with deep excavations, complex soil deposits, and artifacts from all periods of the town’s history. To date we have recovered thousands of artifacts spanning this history, starting with the Native American settlement that existed before the arrival of the Pilgrims, through the period when Plymouth was a colonial town, and into the 19th century when the landscape was dramatically reshaped.

 

The Search Continues

A section of the 1874 Beers map of Plymouth showing the former buildings along School Street at the edge of the cemetery.

A section of the 1874 Beers map of Plymouth showing the former buildings along School Street at the edge of the cemetery.

The major focus of our exploration has been along School Street on the eastern edge of Burial Hill. Burial Hill is on the National Register of Historic Places, with more than 2,200 gravestones dating from 1681 to 1957, and a diverse collection of memorial monuments. Before it was used as a burial ground, the high point atop the hill was the location of the Plymouth Colony’s fort from 1620 to 1676. From the fort the main road of the original settlement ran down what is now Leyden Street, with the houses lining the street encircled by a wooden palisade fence estimated at a half mile around. Two markers on Burial Hill identify potential locations of historic fortifications and another shows the possible site of John Alden’s house inside the palisaded settlement. These markers are only approximate, as there are no historic maps of the fort or settlement.

DSC02701Our work on the east side of Burial Hill has been focused on a north-south corridor between School Street and the burials uphill to the west. This strip of land was built up with stables, storehouses, two schools, and a series of other buildings in the late 18th through 19th centuries. These buildings were later torn down to remake Burial Hill into a more commemorative landscape. We have been digging inside, between, and behind these historic structures to map the different artifact deposits and look for preserved remains of the early settlement. In areas with this type of complex land-use history, early artifact deposits are intermingled with often much more abundant evidence of more recent use of the land. While some artifacts tell unique stories, together they provide clues to people’s past activities and help us envision the way the landscape changed over time.

This year, we are continuing our work on Burial Hill as well as expanding to examine some other sites. This year, for the first time, we also have a formal lab component in a new, open lab at Plimoth Plantation.

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