Okay, I'm standing in a test that we opened in December, been open for a couple of months,
exploring the chancel inside the 1640s church and 1617 church, potentially as well. And we've
just started to move to the west towards what's referred to as the Knights Tomb,
a ledger tablet that would have had brasses in it, that have been removed and then the ledger stone
for one of the reverence who would have served the church, Reverend John Clow. And in moving
this direction we took out a section of brickwork that was dividing what would be the cross style
that these Ledger's stones are sitting in and the chancel space as it stood when our archaeologist
in the early 1900's were digging the church. One of the most exciting finds is underneath that
division wall that we removed, which had been put back in 1905, is we've got a bunch of pavers or
tiles that are laid on a mortar bed that appeared to be the floor for the chancel that we had seen
all the way across, but this is the actual floor that was left. The excavators did not take down
these tiles in this mortar bed, so this is virgin soil as far as archaeology is concerned and that's
got us really excited. One of the reasons we think that all of this has been sinking like it is,
is because of the interments, the burials, underneath the chancel for the high status
individuals are settling, because of the disturbed soil. And so, all of the tiles are quite a
few inches below where they originally would have sat and then towards the middle of the
chancel they must have been deeper interments, because you can see these tiles are actually
slumped down towards the middle here and some of them are pretty dramatically slumped.
The next thing that we're going to do is continue to move west,
which means we'll kick it to our conservation department to help us so with these Ledger's
stones and make sure that they're properly preserved and that we move them in a way
that's it's safe and it's safe for the artifact. This intact floor will try to
preserve as much as we can and see if there's any more intact and it's the second place in
the church where we have intact floor and we'll kick it over to Bob Chartrand and he'll show
you what he is finding to the west of where I am now in the body of the church.
All right so we started working outside the chancel rail to take a look at what the APVA
had excavated in 1901 and have uncovered several features, some that are undisturbed by those
1901 excavations. We have the Ambler wall or the cemetery wall dating either 1799 or 1803,
according to two separate documents. An interesting feature that we have uncovered
is an intact brick flooring dating back to possibly as early as the 1640s church. We have
a several bricks on top of the mortar padding, but what's interesting about the mortar padding
is we actually have brick imprints showing where brick had once been placed. All right,
one interesting discovery that we've uncovered here is possibly the western extent of the church
chancel and/or quire. The farthest extent we're running west it seems to be running
about 16 feet off of the eastern wall of the Memorial Church. It's a low fired either brick
or brick dust. So we have a photograph from the 1901 excavations and in the photograph
is an open burial and we may have found the extent of that excavation right here,
intruding into a historic feature, as well as into the native horizon level.
I'm standing in the builders trench for the church tower. There was a test trench here in the early
20th century that was dug by Colonel Samuel Young, who was a one of the Army Corps of Engineers,
who came out and on his drawings he had indicated that they had this dramatic spread footer all the
way around the tower, which we wanted to verify that and so when we dug we continued on and went
around the church tower and found out that that was not the case. There was a very, very slight
overhang of a brick, maybe a half an inch, but it's nothing like as dramatic as it is here
on the north side. So as we got to the end of our trench, we encountered a brick wall, which is the
1640s brick foundation and as we went around the corner there it was gradually revealed that
there is some unusual brickwork, which we didn't initially realize was an arch as it turned out to be,
because once you get down to the bottom of it and clean off the extra mortar, an actual structure
is revealed that it is an arch and you can see where the excavation goes underneath it.
One theory is that this arch could have been an escape route for water to drain away from the foundations.