After lunch we were presented with our very own Marshalltown trowels, which we were to immediately label. I had brought my trowel despite it not being on the packing list. Suddenly I understood why we did not have to bring one.
Martha and I were then introduced to Mary Margaret, a charming young lady from Texas who would serve as our one-to-two guide the entire week.
Our first task was to sift the dirt Mary Margaret had already dug. I instantly had screen envy. The screens at Montpelier are set up at adult height. There is the upper screen that has 1/2" screens that sift to the lower 1/4" inch screens. That then go into a wheelbarrow that is wheeled to a nearby truck. The screens are a thing of beauty.
Ten minutes into the sifting a couple walked over wearing Road Scholar nametags. I was surprised to see people because the site is closed to the public on Mondays, but it was a special tour. Just as Mary Margaret was finished explaining what we were doing to this couple, another member of the group came over and she patiently started all over again. This was repeated several times. I could see the people and knew they would space themselves out just so. They did not disappoint. I thought Martha was going to lose it when an older gentleman asked about our best find for the day. She said we only started ten minutes ago, but they did not take a hint.
Every site is different in what they keep vs. what they toss. Montpelier keeps every.single.piece.of.slag. Pieces that are large enough to rest in the 1/4" screens are kept with the same reverence as pieces of ceramic. Later in the week we weighed 11 bags of slag, a total of 370 pounds.
Slag is something we are used to tossing at Newlin Grist Mill and other sites. It was tough to train my brain to keep it, and even harder to train my brain to revere it (I accept that revere is an exaggeration).
Another item we were to keep that we are used to tossing: river smoothed stones (because there is no river nearby).
Tiny pieces of brick, quartz (which I was to save at the Lac Phillippe site), and charcoal were not kept. Every site has their own rules. This one had a lot more rules than we are used to. As we collected artifacts, we bagged them by type, giving each plastic bag a long series of numbers, which was all entered into a iPad on scene (similar to what happened in Israel on the 2019 dig, though with a different database working behind the scenes). We were exposed to all aspects of the dig.
Finally were were put in a 5 foot x 5 foot unit. The staff was excellent at keeping the shade over us so the dirt would not dry out in the sun. We were assigned the slag-filled square. It was slow going. We kept being told we were *almost* at the next level. But first...
First we had to carefully scrape away the layer so the brown-red dirt was distinguishable from the red-brown dirt. Later in the week I used the Monsell book, so I should be able to note the technical colors. I was too amazed at using pages other than 10YR and 7.5YR to note the exact numbers.
I had serious flashbacks (PTSD) to my 2019 dig in Israel when I was tasked with cleaning the walls and floor. No matter how hard I tried, it was not going to be clean enough. We all knew it was not interesting enough to ever appear in a publication, but just in case it had to be perfectly clean because that is the procedure.
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Cleaning tools included a tiny broom
and a shovel-shaped spoon |
That was the case here, too. Finally Martha and I handed Mary Margaret and another archaeologist our spaces and told them to just do it. We wanted to dig not clean. I never did see our unit clean enough to be photographed, but I was assured it was.
That was my biggest frustration with the week. When I signed up I envisioned six to eight hours of digging, sifting, and organizing our finds. I pictured returning back to the hotel sore but happy. Instead we had tours each day that ran longer than scheduled, and our time in the unit was spent making dirt floors look clean. If I didn't have the skill in Israeli sand, I was not going to magically learn it on Virginia clay. Meanwhile Ed and Percy in the trench next to us where filling many buckets using Japanese trowels we didn't touch. Bethany and Bill, and Frannie and Janice also sifted seemingly endless buckets of dirt. I wish we had rotated units throughout the week.
It also didn't help the first bucket dug in each layer was set aside for a deeper screening at a later date, one that would turn up items that fall through the 1/4" inch screen such as straight pins and beads. In other words, the first three days we only dug a gallon of dirt and did not have anything to sift.
By 2:30 we heard the call for Last Dirt. We cleaned up the site, putting burlap on the bottom, with plywood on top of that, then the small tarp, followed by the medium tarp, then the large tarp. The tarps were held in place by sandbags, which after spending a couple of years digging at Newlin and placing giant rocks (which we have in abundance) on the tarp, I found amusing bags had to be purchased to seal up the site for the night.
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| The lower entrance to the ice house is behind the plywood. |
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| Showing off Fort Mifflin. |
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| Our first find ... a horseshoe nail. |
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Yes, it looks beautiful. The crumble layer is
another layer of slag. |
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| Packing up for the night. |
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Heading home for the day
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During our artifact handling class we were shown this red ring. At first glance, it does not look like much. It is perfectly round. Felt more like a mass manufactured plastic ring than a treasure. We were allowed to touch it. Hold it. The only thing we were not allowed to do was put it on our fingers. It is heading to an exhibit case soon in an exhibit on Religion Freedom.
Liz continued, last year a researcher studying Cornelian believed this was a hair bead. The researcher had a background in West African artifacts.
