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