Clearing and Testing, 1999

The full excavation of the Atkinson site began in 1999, using students in a summer field school from the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of Ph.D. candidate Kevin Bartoy. The site at that time was covered in reasonably dense woods, and the first effort was aimed at manually clearing the trees off the site and establishing a “site grid,” which would allow Bartoy and his colleagues to control the excavation process.


Clearing the brush on the site before excavation.

Because the site had been plowed in the nineteenth century, it was evident that much of the intact stratigraphy near the surface had been destroyed. This is extremely common in the Chesapeake, and archaeologists have devised several creative ways to sample the “plowzone” layers and infer the original configuration of the site. Thus, the 1999 season consisted primarily of thorough, meticulous recording and excavation of the plowzone and other disturbed deposits in an attempt to see what kinds of spatial patterns could be deduced, and what sort of information could be obtained by the intensive use of high-powered recovery techniques such as flotation, chemical, and phytolith analysis.


Area of the main dwelling after clearing.		Kevin Bartoy (in green hat) and students laying out the site grid

This painstaking field strategy helped demonstrate that, like other artifacts, certain kinds of stratigraphic and botanical evidence retain some spatial integrity, despite the damage caused by plowing.

With a strong interest in the interpretation of archaeology to the public, Bartoy also created an extensive web site with historical background prior to the excavations, as well as on-line daily journals from students and other participants in the 1999 and 2000 seasons. This site can be investigated at:

http://mactia.berkeley.edu/m100

An interactive website was placed in the Winthrop Rockefeller Museum at Carter’s Grove during 1999 and 2000 to allow visitors to follow the progress of excavations.

Due to time constraints, the daily updates were discontinued during the 2001 season.

Digging the Dwelling, 2000