8/3/02-8/4/02
August
3rd
and
4th:
Hot
Stuff!
“It hit 98 down here in town today. I imagine it was a
little cooler up there on top of the mountain.”
Local Storekeeper in Boonsboro Maryland,
evening of August 3rd
…and maybe it was a little cooler, but I doubt it.
Archaeology is done in a very wide variety of environments,
from mountain crests to the ocean
bottom, but it’s almost always done outside.
Consequently, all archaeologists are used to working in a variety of less
than perfect conditions. That said, in the over 25 years I’ve done fieldwork,
Saturday the 3rd of August, 2002, was one of the two or three most
uncomfortable days I’ve ever spent in the field.
By lunch the heat had clamped down like a vice, and the afternoon was
simply incredible. Despite the
heat, the volunteer crew of 20 carried on and made some important discoveries.
That’s the best evidence I have of the real magic of archaeology. The
fascination we all feel at a first hand encounter with our predecessors is so
strong, it simply overrides even tremendous physical discomfort, and pushes us
to open the window to the past a little wider.
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In the east section of the project area, closest to the
Reno Monument, more battle related artifacts, including a round lead ball that
was never fired and an iron buckle that may be from a pack strap were recovered
along with earthenware pottery and glass from the Wise Farm and a few flakes of
rhyolite left by the first Native American visitors at Fox Gap. Some of the
complicated sequences of soil deposits in that area, probably resulting from the
artificial filling of areas close to the historic and modern roadbeds, are
beginning to reveal themselves through patient excavation and mapping.
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In the west section, close to the expected site of the Wise
Cabin, the fill and rubble deposits encountered during our last round of
excavations proved to be more than four feet deep! As volunteer excavators
pushed their way deeper into this rubble, the occasional artifact (an old
handmade hinge, a fragment of an oil lamp chimney) tempted them with hints about
what might lie beneath it. By Sunday, we’d still not broken through the fill.
Discussions among the crew are began to focus on the distinct possibility that
this rubble filled cavity might just be the cellar hole of the Wise
Cabin! We simply don’t know yet, but this weekend’s discoveries set the
stage for a dramatic change in methods for our last weekend of fieldwork as we
try to reconstruct the location of the cabin.