Welcome everyone, to another exciting field season at Hassanamesit Woods! My name is Heather Law Pezzarossi, I’m a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley and a graduate of UMASS’s Master’s Program in Historical Archaeology (2008). I’m currently writing my dissertation on the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site and I’ll be helping run the field school again this year. I’ll be blogging here regularly, and hope to enlist others from the Hassanamesit Woods Project to share their interests and expertise with the world as well 🙂 The Hassanamesit Woods Project is a collaborative effort between The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, The Nipmuc Nation, and the Town of Grafton, MA. With these blog posts, we hope to make our research a little more accessible to anyone who wants to learn, and give everyone a chance to actively participate in an ongoing public dialog about the project. We highly value your interest and participation in the learning process. We hope you will check back regularly for updates on the excavations, and look forward to your comments!
Today was our first day. Dr. Steve Mrozowski (principle investigator of the Hass Woods Project and director of the Fiske Center) welcomed 15 students to the field school and gave a brief lecture on the history of the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site and the Deb Newman Homestead Site. He gave the students a tour of our laboratories at UMASS Boston and then he, Dr. Heather Trigg, and the graduate students helped transport equipment to the Sarah Boston Site where we will begin work in the morning! More on our excavation strategy and our first site pictures of the year, tomorrow!

click here to catch up on last year’s excavations at the Sarah Boston Site!
Check out our extensive field reports from 2005 and 2008 for even more information on the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site!