The Fiske Center Blog

This post looks back to one of the specialized activities that we did at the outset of the Plymouth field school this year.

We Came, We Saw, We Cored
By Anya Gruber

At the beginning of field school, a small group of professors and students (led by Dr. Heather Trigg) set out to core the sediments at Brewster Gardens, a public park on the waterfront, just down the street from Cole’s Hill. Since we’ve never excavated in this area, we were interested in coring so we could get an idea of what the stratigraphy of the soil looks like under the sod. It seemed like the best way to peek into the stratigraphy since coring works well in wet, marshy soil, just like the banks of the stream in Brewster Gardens. Wet deposits can also trap and preserve pollen, so we also wanted to find a place to take a core to look at changes in the local environment over time.

There are several ways to go about taking a core sample; you can use a hand corer, which is a short metal tube that you push into the ground by hand and then pull out, trapping in soil that can then be pushed out and analyzed for sediment, artifacts, and other clues into the chronology of soil layers in a particular area. This method can be difficult in Plymouth, though, because there are so many rocks that block the core from smoothly entering the soil. The alternate coring method uses the same basic ideas, but with bigger, heavier equipment. At Brewster Gardens, we used a full-size vibracorer, which has many more moving parts to it: a 10 ft. metal tripod, a motorized head powered by two heavy marine batteries, several-meters-long plastic and aluminum tubes, and all sorts of screws and different kinds of tape to keep everything in place. The heavy head generates vibrations that help push the coring tubes into the sediments.

Before we could turn on the machine and take the sample, we had to choose exact locations to core. We wanted a marshy but not super soggy, relatively flat surface far away from large tree roots and utility lines. We decided on three different locations: behind the Pilgrim Maiden fountain, between the stream and the benches, and next to the rock wall. The head hangs from the tripod, which was hoisted up by a pulley. The tube (the plastic one broke the first time we used it, so we switched to using only aluminum) was screwed onto a platform at the bottom of the base and carefully lowered into place, exactly where we want it to enter the ground. We then switched the machine on, and with some help from Blaine Borden, Professor Landon, and Professor Trigg pulling the head down, the tube goes straight into the ground. Luckily, we did not have much trouble with the tube getting blocked by the ubiquitous Plymouth rocks. However, the core was driven into the ground so tightly that we had to turn the vibracorer on again to shake it up so we could pull the tube out again.
We took four samples in total, one of which we kept in the tube to bring back to the lab, and the other three we looked at in the field. The one we kept will be taken out and analyzed in the fall; I’m hoping there’s some seventeenth-century pollen in there! The three we looked at in the field appeared to be mostly fill, from when the whole area was filled in to create land, as Brewster Park had been a tidal pool when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620 – but we did find a few artifacts, including a red rhyolite flake and some redware. There were also different layers of sediments in the core, including dark, organic silts and yellow coarse sand. The process of filling this area, which transformed it from a tidal inlet to a park is one of the landscape changes that we are interested in documenting. Additionally, since the process of filling can cap, bury, and preserve older layers, areas where there are buried ground surfaces could be archaeologically interesting.

By Victoria Cacchione

Our excavation units near Cole’s Hill in Plymouth were placed because this lot may be near the original northern edge of the 17th-century settlement. The lot had a building on it from 1800 to the mid-20th century, but the large back and side yards around the building meant that there were areas where early deposits might be preserved. Prior to 1800, the lot held a house and a blacksmith shop, and earlier there was a lime kiln in the area.

Each of the three excavation units on Cole’s Hill presented its own challenges and questions that required decisions about excavation strategies and provided numerous teachable moments for the student archaeologists. From the beginning, Excavation Unit 1 (EU1) proved to be a complex unit with its multiple contexts each full of distinct artifact types. The student excavators, Kerri, Kerri, and Meredith, have continued to diligently document and carefully remove each layer of soil. In doing so, they uncovered the northern-most limits of the previously known 19th-century dwelling on the property. This foundation wall consists of a jumble of coarse stones that appear to have been dislodged into unstable positions when the structure was demolished after 1920. Knowing this, the archaeologists were faced with deciding how to proceed with their excavations. Do they continue excavating the southern half of their unit that includes the interior of the foundation filled with 20th-century debris? Or do they confine themselves to the northern section of the unit? Ultimately, they decided to continue with excavating solely the northern portion of EU1, the outside of the building. This decision had already yielded a find in the form of a French drain and possible remnants of the cellar bulkhead entry. This find adds to the overall understanding of the occupation and use of Cole’s Hill while also exposing new questions.

Over in Excavation Unit 3 (EU3), the student archaeologists (Victoria, Nadia, and Laura) continually unearthed mysterious and complex artifacts from the beginning of the week until the end of the day Friday. Monday brought the first of many preservation challenges when the students discovered possible preserved organic material (mainly leather and wood), a surprise given the rare instance of such a find archaeologically let alone in New England with its acidic soil. The rarity of such a discovery provided challenges of knowing how to preserve the organics in the summer heat once the excavators removed them from the soil. We quickly became experts in making tin-foil packages of various sizes, wrapped around dust pans, clip boards, and lunch trays in order to create sealed, stable, protective surfaces for these fragile artifacts. Once excavated, the organic materials were whisked away to the nearest refrigerator to keep them from drying out and then taken to UMass Boston and turned over to Dennis Piechota for conservation and examination in the lab. Even when some of the organic objects are not preserved intact, he will be able to provide information about the materials that they were made of. Associated with the organic materials are small finds of female personal adornment pieces and sewing equipment dating to the late 19th century. However, these findings again prove to present more questions than answers. How and why were these artifacts deposited? Archaeologists hope to answer these questions with continued excavations and research.

Not to be left out, Excavation Unit 5 (EU5) also exposed the challenges of urban archaeology and provided a lesson in excavation safety. Professor David Landon described this unit as the epitome of urban archaeology as the unit measures three feet deep and is still full of destruction rubble. For instance, one moment the archaeologists shared their excitement over uncovering 17th-century ceramics; the next, the presence of a mid nineteenth century sherd of ceramic dashes all traces of celebration as it indicates the context is a fill layer. It seems that the units crosses the line of a filled cellar from an earlier, previously unknown building on the site that was filled after the new house was built in 1800.
Nevertheless, the finding of 17th-century artifacts is an exciting indication of possible earlier occupation of the site. In addition to its lessons on urban archaeology, EU3 also provided the student archaeologists with an example of how to navigate voids in the soil. Voids in the soil could be the result of burrowing animals, or small air pockets between loose rubble, or large air pockets in an incompletely filled structure. In instances where soil disappears into these abysses, it is always wise to be aware and carefully determine the depth of such voids. Luckily, the voids in EU5 were small gaps in the rubble fill and did not pose a threat to the archaeologists. The archaeologists working on Cole’s Hill hope to answer some if not all of the questions this week’s excavations presented as they wrap up this session of the Plymouth Field School.

Victoria Cacchione is a student in the MA program in Historical Archaeology at UMass Boston.

UMass Boston Plymouth Fieldschool
Friday, June 24, 9 am-3 pm

Burial Hill
School St., Plymouth, MA

Coles Hill, Pilgrim Society Lot
Corner of Middle and Carver, Plymouth, MA

Our 2016 field season in Plymouth is underway! We’ll have a few posts with details about the work soon; this post gives a quick overview of the project. You can also read updates from earlier years by looking at everything categorized under Plymouth (here).

The approaching 400^th anniversary (1620–2020) of the arrival of the Pilgrims and founding of the Plymouth Colony provides an opportunity to reexamine the region’s history and archaeology. Since 2013, Fiske Center archaeologists have been excavating in downtown Plymouth to try to locate any preserved remains of the 17^th-century Plymouth Colony settlement. This project is a collaboration with Plimoth Plantation, and the summer research is run as an archaeological field school, with new and returning students comprising the field crew. Our goal is to add new information to our understanding of the Plymouth Colony, the colonists’ relations with Native Wampanoag people, and the growth and evolution of the Town of Plymouth.

We have been combining traditional archaeological excavation with geophysical survey techniques, mostly ground penetrating radar. The ground penetrating radar is used to map soil properties to help guide the digging and characterize broader areas than can be excavated. The excavation work that follows is a careful process of sifting for artifacts and mapping the soil levels to interpret the age and history of each section of the site. Despite its appearance as a small town today, the archaeology in Plymouth is very “urban,” with deep excavations, complex soil deposits, and artifacts from all periods of the town’s history. To date we have recovered thousands of artifacts spanning this history, starting with the Native American settlement that existed before the arrival of the Pilgrims, through the period when Plymouth was a colonial town, and into the 19^th century when the landscape was dramatically reshaped.

 

The Search Continues

The major focus of our exploration has been along School Street on the eastern edge of Burial Hill. Burial Hill is on the National Register of Historic Places, with more than 2,200 gravestones dating from 1681 to 1957, and a diverse collection of memorial monuments. Before it was used as a burial ground, the high point atop the hill was the location of the Plymouth Colony’s fort from 1620 to 1676. From the fort the main road of the original settlement ran down what is now Leyden Street, with the houses lining the street encircled by a wooden palisade fence estimated at a half mile around. Two markers on Burial Hill identify potential locations of historic fortifications and another shows the possible site of John Alden’s house inside the palisaded settlement. These markers are only approximate, as there are no historic maps of the fort or settlement.

Our work on the east side of Burial Hill has been focused on a north-south corridor between School Street and the burials uphill to the west. This strip of land was built up with stables, storehouses, two schools, and a series of other buildings in the late 18th through 19th centuries. These buildings were later torn down to remake Burial Hill into a more commemorative landscape. We have been digging inside, between, and behind these historic structures to map the different artifact deposits and look for preserved remains of the early settlement. In areas with this type of complex land-use history, early artifact deposits are intermingled with often much more abundant evidence of more recent use of the land. While some artifacts tell unique stories, together they provide clues to people’s past activities and help us envision the way the landscape changed over time.

This year, we are continuing our work on Burial Hill as well as expanding to examine some other sites. This year, for the first time, we also have a formal lab component in a new, open lab at Plimoth Plantation.