- Hi, I'm site supervisor Anna Shackelford,
and we are over here by our "dead shed" excavations.
And so that's where we're going to be building
a structure to house our faunal collection.
But we're going to be talking a little bit about the features
that we've been finding over here for this episode of "Dig Deeper."
[music]
[trowel scraping]
Before discussing our archaeological finds,
Dave Givens will present the results of the GPR study
that you saw run in "Dig Deeper" episode 12.
- So once we complete the fieldwork,
which is really what takes the most amount of time,
we always run our surveys in a unidirectional manner
with 1/2-foot or 1-foot intervals.
The quick part is actually the processing once we go back in the lab.
So let's go ahead and go into our offices,
and in the air conditioning, and see what we've found.
Back here in the office, we've taken all the images
that were done and interpolated them together
to make a three-dimensional map of what's under the ground.
In this image, you can see the test unit holes
that were put out to 12 for where the "dead shed"
or the storage shed's supposed to go.
And then in the upper portion of the image, you see
where the building is in existence,
and we couldn't go past that building.
Now, the interpolated images allow us
to slice down into the earth,
and geophysical practitioners refer to these as slices,
because literally, you're going down in the earth.
Now one of the first things you can see is this boundary line here.
This is actually an historic feature,
we think a boundary ditch or some sort of fortification feature.
But you can see it's been cut through, and now we know,
with the imagery, that that's actually a utility line.
And in fact, if we zoom in, you can actually see
the pipe come into play here.
Now, other features that are within here that are kind of interesting
is there's a power line that comes out of the structure
and is heading across the field to the Dale House,
and that's intersected by another utility line,
which was put in while I was working here,
which is the network line to the museum.
Now, these other, darker features you see here
are plantings from where bushes were planted behind the museum.
So we're not seeing a whole lot of historic features,
except for this ditch feature,
within the area of the shed.
But that's normal-- we often encounter
graves and older ditches and things like that
that you just aren't going to see.
So I'll be curious to see what they find out out there,
and they, like I said, again,
they should run into these utilities that were put in over time.
- So a lot of the features
that we've been finding here over by the "dead shed"--
we have a few modern ones as well as some
that may date back to the 17th century,
So back here where field technician Caitlin Delmas is working,
you can see we have this line
running fairly east-west across the unit.
This is actually a modern telecommunications utility line,
so we're not actually going to dig down into that at all.
We're going to just uncover the top so we can map it and know where it is.
We also have another fairly modern utility trench
running fairly north-south here.
And this one is a little bit older,
possibly dating back towards the 1950s.
Both of these utility trenches we actually saw
on our GPR readings that we conducted
before actually opening up the excavation site here.
Some more modern features we have is we've come across a couple of planting holes,
so that's what that sandy pit is right there.
There used to be a tree there, and there's actually a wire cage
that had been placed down in there to hold the tree that we had to cut out.
And we have another one in the unit behind me as well.
As far as older features go,
one of the ones we have in here right now is this burial.
And you can see that it is running just about perfectly east-west,
so that's one indication that it is a burial.
Also, note the size of it--
it's just big enough for a person--
as well as the color of the soil in there.
You can see that people had to dig down through, you know,
the Native horizon, E horizon, and subsoil,
and once they filled it all back in,
all of that got jumbled together.
So with this modern utility ditch here,
the reason that we were actually testing into it
is because in those original ground-penetrating radar surveys,
we originally thought it may be part of a boundary ditch
that would be quite a bit earlier.
And we were doing this test to see if we could find any artifacts
that likely would have been trash placed in that ditch to fill it up
to see if we could date it.
But as you can see from the sides of the test here,
they're very, very vertical.
And so that's an indication that it's a more modern feature.
If it was a historic ditch, the sides would be more sloped.
And you can also see here, the modern utility trench
actually cuts through this burial.
And another indication is that in our profile back here,
we can actually see that this modern utility line
cuts through what we call the plow zone,
and the plow zone in this area-- I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like.
It's where plows have just been drawn through the soil,
churning everything up together,
and that's going to be dated back more towards the 1700s and 1800s,
so after when a lot of the property ditches
would have been dug in this area.
And then over on the other side of the unit,
we also originally had some plow scars,
and so that's where, against the subsoil,
you can see these almost tiger stripe-looking features
where the plow dug down into the subsoil
and that mixed soil filled in those divots.
- Hi, I am field technician Caitlin Delmas,
and I am also working over here in the "dead shed" area.
But unlike the two units over there,
I am in a unit that is a work in progress.
So typically, if we're in undisturbed soil,
before we can get down to the historical features and artifacts
that we're really interested in,
we typically have to dig through some modern things as well.
So in my unit here, I have a planting hole
very similar to the one in the other unit.
However, in my unit, I also had a large amount of gravel,
which you can actually see in this caramel color
in the profile here.
So we've taken almost all of that out at this point,
and I am starting to come down to plow zone here,
which is where we're trying to get to,
and it has a lot of brick inclusions in it,
which is how we know that we're coming down on top of it.
- So this is what we know about the site as of August 14.
Please watch future "Dig Deeper" videos, because we expect to see
additional features as we remove the plow zone layer.
Also, while our work is currently focused on the "dead shed" construction area,
the GPR results are compelling enough that we'll probably come back
to this area for study in the future.
[music]