The Fiske Center Blog

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

2014 Excavations at Hassanamesit Woods Begin

June 16, 2014 by Jessica Rymer | 0 comments

The 2014 field season at Hassanamesit Woods has commenced! Welcome back to the Hass Woods blog- my name is Jessica Rymer, a graduate student in the Historical Archaeology MA program at UMass. I’ll be posting throughout the next few weeks from the field school at Hassanamesit Woods. This summer four undergraduate students and five graduate students (including myself) will spend the next five weeks under the direction of Dr. Steve Mrozowski (accompanied by Dr. Heather Trigg) investigating the potential site of the of home of Deborah Newman, a Nipmuc woman who, according to local history, was said to live “across the road” from Lewis Ellis, whose father Amos Ellis helped in constructing the house of Sarah Burnee that have been the focus of the previous year’s excavations. Using the data recovered from an intensive STP survey that the Fiske Center conducted in 2010, we’ve begun placing 2M X 2M units around the test pits with the highest concentrations of creamware, brick, and nails, artifact categories which suggest that a late 18th/early 19th c. home was somewhere in the vicinity.
Of course before excavations could begin in earnest, we had some cleaning to do:

From front to back:  Kristina, Shala, and Janice use machetes and loppers clear the area around a test pit

From front to back: Kristina, Shala, and Janice use machetes and loppers clear the area around a test pit


 Carolyn repairs a shaker screen before it goes into the field

Carolyn repairs a shaker screen before it goes into the field


Kristina sharpens a machete

Kristina sharpens a machete


Steph repairs a pair of loppers

Steph repairs a pair of loppers


Dr. Heather Trigg instructs students in how to put in a 2 X 2 M unit

Dr. Heather Trigg instructs students in how to put in a 2 X 2 M unit


Kristina, Carolyn, and Dr. Trigg screen for artifacts while Janice (back), Kristina and Diana work on making more dirt

Kristina, Carolyn, and Dr. Trigg screen for artifacts while Janice (back), Kristina and Diana work on making more dirt


Kristina, Carolyn, and Dr. Trigg screen for artifacts while Kristina and Diana (front) continue digging.  Dr. Mrozowski and Janice discuss her unit (back)

Kristina, Carolyn, and Dr. Trigg screen for artifacts while Kristina and Diana (front) continue digging. Dr. Mrozowski and Janice discuss her unit (back)

So far digging in the rocky New England soil has been a challenge, but since every large rock has the potential to be a part of the foundation we’ve kept going. As part of our sampling strategy Dr. Heather Trigg has been taking soil samples; stay tuned for a post on this fits in to our search for the foundation.
By Jessica Rymer

Thinking Through Sampling and Stratigraphy at SBFS

June 20, 2013 by Fiske Center | 0 comments

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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