August
17th and 18th: Tools of the Trade
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Archaeological sites are found in all kinds of environments
and settings, and they’re as varied in size and contents as the groups of
people who create them. This variability forces archaeologists to be flexible
and innovative. The range of tools and methods of excavation and study is every
bit as wide as the range of sites people leave behind.
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So far, in our explorations of the archaeology of Fox Gap, all of our work has been done manually and electronically, but the stubborn, deep and densely compacted fill we encountered in our last weekend of excavation dictated a change in strategy, which led to some spectacular results.
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When the operator pushed the starter button, the backhoe roared to life, causing me to swallow hard. Heavy mechanized equipment certainly has it’s place in the archaeologist’s toolkit, but it can be risky. Inattention, or an inexperienced operator, can lead to a disastrous loss of information. Fortunately Bill Harclerode, of the South Mountain Recreation Area’s maintenance staff, has many years of experience and can just about pick the hat off your head with the bucket. We monitored his progress carefully as he expertly cut a ditch about three feet wide and 20 feet long through the rubble and into the underlying sediments below it. When he was done, we were able to carefully scrape down the walls of the trench, and marvel at the discoveries he’d exposed!
As it happens, the concrete cistern we’d
encountered during our GPS survey last winter held a secret .
What looked like a cistern proved to be a brick vault, carefully covered
over with concrete (sometime in the 20th century), and it sat atop,
and completely hid, a stone lined well! Twenty
feet or so south of the well, a dense concentration of large stones and rubble
exposed by the backhoe, slowly resolved itself into the outline of a
rubble-filled crawl space or cellar hole of a building. From the rubble in the
crawl space, a chunk of lime mortar chinking was recovered.
That’s the kind of material used to fill the gaps between the logs of a
cabin!
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All of the excitement engendered by the discovery of a well
and a cabin must be tempered by the scientist’s caution and skepticism.
We clearly have a well and cabin, but do we have Wise’s well and cabin?
The historic records and photographs would suggest these features should have
been somewhat further west than we found them. The cross section of the cellar
hole visible in the backhoe cut seems smaller than what we’ve guesstimated the
Wise Cabin to be. As usual, the archaeological discoveries of the weekend have
raised at least as many questions as they’ve answered.
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Some of those questions might be answered in the next phase of our project; the analysis of the records, photographs, drawings and artifacts resulting from our fieldwork. As we attempt to put the puzzle together we invite you along as we go into the lab and try to unravel the complicated history of this quiet little gap in the Blue Ridge.
(Note: Stay tuned for monthly entries as the analysis of the results of our fieldwork continues through the Fall and Winter of 2002-2003)
