The Fiske Center Blog

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

Hassanamesit Woods Field Season | 2013

May 30, 2013 by Fiske Center | 0 comments

Welcome everyone, to the 2013 archaeological field season at the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site! For the next month, we’ll be working with a crew of 3 undergraduates and 7 graduate students at the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site, an 18th and early 19th c. Nipmuc Farmstead site in Grafton, Massachusetts. The Fiske Center for Archaeological Research takes pride in our collaboration with the Nipmuc Nation and the Town of Grafton on this project. These blog posts are an attempt to make the archaeology we do more accessible to the community, so that people with a vested interest in Nipmuc history can share in our endeavors. You can read more about the project and the goals of the project here.

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

Refitting Sarah’s Slip Decorated Mug

September 8, 2012 by Fiske Center | 3 Comments

At the Fiske Center Lab we often try to refit sherds of ceramics we suspect might go together. This task can sometimes be frustrating because the sherds we find near one another in the ground at the Sarah Boston Site (and other sites too) don’t necessarily belong to the same vessel. The site was plowed and trampled so much during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that objects were broken up into very small pieces and distributed widely across the hillside, making it difficult to reunite the scattered pieces. But, every once in a while, we get lucky and are able to refit something enough to be able to tell exactly what it was.

Detail of a cabled cat’s eye slip decoration (University of Maryland)

This is the base of a factory slipped tankard or mug with a cabled cat’s eye design. The cat’s eye design was made by using a three-chambered slip cup, which was essentially a tinware chamber that held 3 different colors of slip and dispensed it evenly in tricolored droplets. A trail of these droplets makes what we call a “cable” design (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:126). This kind of design was popular in the first half of the 19th century, after the invention of the three-chambered slip cup in 1811 (Carpentier and Rickard 2001:128), so it would likely have been used by Sarah Boston herself in the last few decades of her residence on Keith Hill. These kinds of vessels would have been widely available for purchase at the local general store. Maybe Sarah got hers at the “Green Store” on the Grafton Common!

Refitting the base of a mug from the Sarah Boston Site

by Heather Law Pezzarossi

North Wall 3D imaging

August 14, 2012 by Fiske Center | 0 comments

Thanks everyone, for tuning in to the Hassanamesit Woods blog posts this summer! We’ve enjoyed sharing our field work with you and hope that you’ll stay tuned throughout the year for intermittent updates on our progress in the lab. For our last field post of the season, I’ve got a great 3D model to share with you. As you know from previous posts, I’ve been working hard this year at getting a full 3D model of the foundation together. Well, I didn’t quite get there! But this technology is very new, and I’m sure that as I familiarize myself with new 3D tools and continue to learn from my mistakes, I will only get better at this! In the mean time, I leave you with a pretty awesome model of the north wall of the foundation. We spent a lot of time defining the foundation walls this summer, and I think this imaging does a great job of showing the 4-5 in-tact courses of dry laid foundation stones that are still holding steady, well over 200 years after they were put in position!

Enjoy and thanks for your support! And don’t forget to watch in HD!

By Heather Law Pezzarossi

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