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.

Jerry and Aileen excavating an STP

Terraced yards behind houses across Spring Lane. The topography that we are finding might indicate similar terraces in the lot where we are working that have now been filled over.

Photo by Gerrit Vyn

We’ve set our sights on some achievable goals for the season. We’ll be doing a small amount of work in the foundation itself: creating some large profile drawings and working on a nearby feature. But most of our efforts will be directed toward a broad scale exploration of the farmstead area. We’d like to be sure that we’ve sampled each of the zones around the house carefully, in the event that the barn or the earlier pre-1750 dwelling is nearby. With the help of Dr. Steinberg, we’ve established a strategy that assures us that the 30m perimeter around the house has been evenly sampled. We begin work on these units on Monday. Stay tuned for updates!

Miles screening.

Dr. Steinberg and crew members locate the new units using the laser transit.

Katherine updates paperwork.

by: Heather Law Pezzarossi

We were very pleased to introduce the site to a new group of field school students this week, and we look forward to your questions and comments about our work this season. The Fiske Center has conducted an advanced field school at Hassanamesit Woods for the past 7 seasons, so we have accomplished a lot already! But there are some questions that remain and we will focus our efforts on addressing those as soon as we get settled. Today was spent cleaning out the site, raking leaves, drying tarps, laying in units, and of course, going over the basics of our excavation strategy with the students. Expect updates on our first excavations soon. For now, I’ll leave you with a few photos from our first day on site. Thanks for your interest!

Kelly, learning the art of screening.

James and Katherine clean out one of our units from last year.

by: Heather Law Pezzarossi

Panorama photo of Burial Hill

Geophysics will be part of the field school at Plymouth.  We plan to do some GPR and conductivity at Burial Hill during the first weeks of the field season.  Brian Damiata and I will be running the survey for the first few weeks of the field school.  You can see some of Brian’s work at Sylmar, Santa Monica, and Crows Landing.  Not only will students learn about collecting the data, but they will also learn how to analyze it with GPR Slice software.

It is not too late to register

Plymoutn in 1846 showing location of archaeological field school.

The Archaeological Field School in Plymouth, Massachusetts is collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston. This summer’s work will help launch “Project 400: The Plymouth Colony Archaeological Survey,” a broad project of site survey and excavation leading up the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Colony in 2020.  Much of the archaeological work will take place along Spring Ln near the Jenney Mill

You can learn more at http://www.umb.edu/academics/caps/summer_programs/field_study/archaeological_plymouth

UMass Boston grad student Allison Conner (left) obtains GPS points while Dr. John Steinberg places flags to mark where the GPR survey would be conducted. Mt. Gilead AME Church is in the background.

Founded sometime in the 1830s, Mount Gilead sits on a wooded ridge in Buckingham, Pennsylvania. At the time of its founding, the church was located in an area surrounded by farms mostly owned by white Quakers. Little has been documented about this church’s history and its relationship with the surrounding areas, although the church leadership believes that there were once one hundred families who lived on the ridge line and comprised the community of the church.

The people buried in the church cemetery include freeborn African-Americans, individuals who escaped or were emancipated from slavery, as well as some people without African descent who have been part of the mountain community as it’s changed over the past century. Local legends and local histories tie this church even more strongly to the Underground Railroad (Blockson 1975:13), including to the figure of Benjamin “Big Ben” Jones, whose dramatic recapture by Southern slave hunters was recently fictionalized in an independent film.

UMass Boston graduate students Nadia Kline (left) and Allison Conner prepare the cemetery for the survey on an unseasonably cold morning.

In terms of the research for my master’s thesis, I am interested in seeing whether the cemetery was in use before the church actually owned the property, potentially suggesting the surreptitious use of this land by people of the Underground Railroad or suggesting types of aid which Quakers in this area may have provided to the people of the church.

In order to do this, we needed to map the locations of extant gravestones as well as use shallow geophysics to see whether all graves in the cemetery are marked. Thanks to a research grant from the Graduate Student Assembly at UMass Boston, I was able to bring several professors (Drs. John Steinberg and John Schoenfelder) as well as two of my fellow graduate students to the site to survey the whole area of the cemetery both above ground and by using ground-penetrating radar (GPR).

John Steinberg pulls the GPR antenna along the ground while Nadia Kline watches the read-out on its monitor.

GPR “sees” graves by sending and receiving pulses of electromagnetic energy into the soil and recording the reflections of that energy off of changes in the ground structure as well as reflections from buried objects.  You can see an example from the Sylvester Manor project for an idea of what these read-outs look like or read a slightly more detailed description of the technology in another Fiske Center blog post.  Unfortunately, GPR has no way to determine the actual age of anything it sees, but by studying the results in combination with archival documents, I’m hoping to be able to be able to answer these and other questions.

The results of this work are still forthcoming, but should help bring to light more about this church’s history, growth, and persistence in the area.  It should also help with ongoing preservation efforts at the church and cemetery.

Reference

Blockson, Charles L.
1975    Pennsylvania’s Black History. Louise B. Stone, editor. Portfolio Associates, Philadelphia, PA.

Dennis Piechota, Heather Trigg, & Steve Mrozowski in Washington Square in front of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU. The Sylvester Manor exhibit, described in the article, is in the red building.

There is a nice article on Sylvester Manor in the Garden section of the New York Times