News from the Trenches
- July 3, 2008
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Katie Sikes
As we begin the second session of the field school, much has changed at the Ravenscroft site. Our first session students completed their excavations of James Knight's 1954 trenches in the new northern section of the site, and began working on some of the older features below last week.
We have found that a line of eighteenth-century postholes we discovered and began excavating last year immediately to the west of the cellar does appear to extend further north into our new excavation area, and may be a fenceline depicted on the 1781 Frenchman's map.
On the other side of the cellar, we have also found another possible posthole that is of similar size shape and color to one we excavated last year, and directly north of it. Once excavated, we will know for certain whether they are consistent in form and whether their artifacts date to the same period. If these postholes are also part of a fence line, it is possible that this fence marked the property boundaries between colonial lots 267 and 268. An apparent need to separate the properties would be interesting, since we know from our chain of title that both lots were owned by the same person throughout most, if not all of the eighteenth century. Our new students this week have begun to open up 18 new one-meter-square units, connecting the two excavation areas by removing the topsoil and plowzone layers of soil in this portion of our site, helping us to gain access to some of the new features, which are now only partially visible.
Andy Edwards' exploratory excavations searching for the edge of the plowzone in hopes of finding intact stratigraphic layers from the eighteenth century have been disappointing so far. While we were able to relocate the sewer trench near Nicholson Street, and excavate another portion of it, the walls of the excavated trench did not reveal the missing layers we had hoped to find.
In the cellar, we have removed the layer of coal and coal dust that we believe to have been deposited as Structure A was torn down and the cellar was filled in. The most recent artifacts retrieved from this layer date to the late eighteenth century, supporting our belief that this building is among the buildings depicted (and therefore still standing) on the Frenchman's map in 1781. Beneath this layer are many bricks, probably from Structure A's now demolished portions above ground. We have also found many places where bricks once rested on the floor of the cellar, but were then removed, leaving an impression that was filled with coal when the cellar was filled in. These brick sockets were probably left when people pulled many of the bricks from Structure A's rubble out of the cellar to reuse them in other masonry projects.
The cellar's earthen floor is much more uneven than we would have expected, and contains many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artifacts—ceramics, animal bone, pipe stems, and fragments of wine bottles. Many of them are concentrated in this feature (below), which we are currently excavating. We have also found the cellar's sump—a lower area in the cellar that allowed water to collect and drain, helping to keep the floor dry. When the building was torn down, this square depression in the cellar floor was filled with the coal that was dumped into the cellar, leaving an obvious feature for us to find.
Outside of the cellar, Teaching Assistant Sarah Chesney has completed her excavation of the builder's trench, and the artifacts in her screen have been consistently seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century. We still have not found anything from the trench that is more recent than 1720, so that date remains the earliest possible date of construction for Structure A.
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