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Wrapping Up Another Field Season at the Ravenscroft Site

• August 5, 2008
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Our field school at Ravenscroft has now come to an end for this final summer. As plans are being made to backfill most or all of the site, we spent our final week attempting to gather as much information from the remaining features as we could without excavating them, by preparing maps, photographs, and soil descriptions for each feature, and using visible artifacts on the surface to date them. We have also been working around Structure A’s unusual exterior cooking hearth. Teaching Assistant Derek Miller and Intern Rachel Horowitz have been busy sampling portions of some early 18th-century midden (trash) layers and Structure A’s builder's trench north of the cellar in this area, where the trench is much wider than it was on the eastern side of the building.

Since the 1998 excavation removed most of the midden layers, we need to investigate this area on the cellar’s north wall in order to clearly understand which midden layers are older than Structure A, and which might have been deposited during the use-life of the building. We plan to leave the rest of the builder’s trench and midden areas intact in case future archaeologists need to revisit them sometime in the future. Our construction date for Structure A, based on known production dates of ceramic artifacts from the builder's trench, still has not changed, remaining at 1720.

We have also been busy adding the final touches to a complete site plan which shows every feature on the site (except for James Knight’s 1954 exploratory trenches).

As you can see, most features overly others, making the site quite complex! Many of these features represent two fencelines—a late 19th- or early 20th-century fenceline running east to west near the northern edge of our site, and an 18th-century fence, depicted on the Frenchman’s map (see this previous post). This earlier fenceline was maintained and repaired often into the 19th century, leaving a new posthole each time an old fencepost was replaced. Earlier in the season, we thought we might have found a smaller fence dividing colonial lots 267 and 268, even though they were owned by the same people throughout most of, if not all of the 18th century. We have since proven that this was probably not the case since there is no evidence of a fenceline between Structures A and B. A feature we earlier thought to be a posthole turned out to be an animal burrow, long since collapsed and filled in! Unfortunately, we have found no evidence of the multiple “convenient” outbuildings described in 18th-century property advertisements for lots including this one. They were apparently located elsewhere on colonial lots 267 and 268.

Just as we have begun to think that the Ravenscroft site has little new to tell us, an exciting surprise appeared among the artifacts last week as our excavations came to a close. A complete quartz projectile point (popularly known as an arrowhead) emerged from one of our 18th-century postholes. Such early finds are unusual in historic Williamsburg, where Native American settlements prior to colonization appear to have been rare. This is the first evidence at the Ravenscroft site of people hunting in the area prior to the Middle Plantation settlements of the 17th century.

Now that our field school excavations are finished, staff archaeologists Andrew Edwards and Meredith Poole of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Department of Archaeological Research will be leading a small crew of dedicated interns and volunteers to complete the excavation of our northern builder’s trench sample and some of our units at the south end of the site for the next few weeks.

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