DelDOT Blogs

A final hello from the Armstrong-Rogers site! In the video below, Dovetail President Kerri Barile highlights some of the great findings of the 9-week long excavation. Although it was determined that the main house site had been destroyed decades earlier, the team uncovered several outbuildings used throughout the farmstead’s period of occupation, from the 1730s through the 1870s. Remains included a dairy, two wells, a smokehouse, a series of intricate drainage channels, and many other historic features. Updates on the lab work associated with this field endeavor will continue to be posted as new finds are discovered. Thank you for continuing to follow our journey!

Feature excavation. Can you dig it?

Noxon Tenancy, 7NC-F-133

Feature Excavation – Over the last two weeks (excluding Thanksgiving) Berger has focused on Feature excavation.  Excavation of Feature 1 is now complete.  The feature proved to be highly irregular. It looks more like two adjacent three throws than a structure.  Feature 1 produced 569 historic artifacts and 578 pieces of animal bone, mostly pig and cow. The artifacts all date to the mid eighteenth century, and include numerous sherds of tin-glazed earthenware and scratch blue stoneware. The feature produced several brick pieces, none larger than a quarter of a brick. This is most of the brick recovered from the site. The brick, and the daub from the nearby pit features, is the only evidence of a house in this area; without the brick distribution, we might think the house was in the northeastern part of the site, around Feature 2 and the midden.  Excavation has begun in Feature 34, the well. So far the excavation is proceeding rapidly, because the feature has produced few artifacts. Half of Feature 2 has been excavated. This feature appears to be a small cellar hole with stepped sides. It measures 6 x 7 feet at the surface and is 2.4 feet deep. Artifact density was moderate throughout, all small pieces resembling the artifacts in the plowzone. 

                                                                                            Cufflink from Feature 2

This week we finished stripping the topsoil from the Noxon Tenancy Site and started working on our features. Before archaeologists dig into a feature, it is always photographed, mapped, and drawn.  So we made a careful map of the site, took the necessary pictures, and then began excavating.

Interesting things started to turn up at once: cow and pig bones, pieces of pottery, even a clay marble. One of our first features contained a large amount of daub. Daub is clay that has been cooked, but not enough to turn it into brick or pottery. On a colonial farm site like the Noxon Tenancy, daub usually comes from a wooden chimney. There is very little brick on the site, not enough to make a chimney, so we already suspected that the house had a wooden chimney. These were always lined with clay, which eventually turned to daub, so all of this daub confirmed our suspicion. As you might imagine, wooden chimneys were not very safe. No matter how carefully they were lined, the clay eventually flaked off or cracked, a spark slipped through, and the whole thing burst into flames. The people who  lived at our site never got around to replacing their wooden chimney with brick or stone, which suggests that they did not live at the site for very long.

One of the artifacts that came out in the first days was a small bowl with a handle, a shape that people in the 1700s called a “porringer.” A porringer was made to be held in the hand while you were eating. They were a very old form, and they remind us that in the Middle Ages most people did not eat at a table. They ate sitting around a hearth, holding their food in their hands or on their laps. Dining at a table was reserved for the rich, or for formal occasions. Over the course of the 1600s and 1700s more and more people came to eat their meals in that formal way, lifting food to their mouths with new invention called a fork instead of with their hands or their pocket knives, not spitting or picking their teeth at the table, and so on. This artifact is a reminder of the old way of eating and living that was slowly giving way to more refined manners.

Fish Scales

Excavation of the cellar hole at the Elkins B site by Hunter Research, Inc. continues to produce a wealth of artifacts and information as we proceed towards the floor.  Items of interest thus far this week are a small lead bird shot, a host of faunal remains (including fish scales), a thimble and a half penny also known as a half pence.  The image on the obverse (or front) side of the copper coin is well worn and the reverse or back side is completely worn.  From what we can see, we have been able to determine the image on the front side of the coin faces right is that of King William III.  The back would have depicted the seated Britania facing left.  Because King William III is not accompanied by Queen Mary (who died of small pox in 1694) the coin must date to between 1695 and 1701.  No halfpennies were produced in England under Queen Anne from 1701 to 1714, thus earlier coins remained in circulation longer than normal and tend to be well-worn.  Given the amount of wear we estimate it was in circulation for around 30 years.  The presence of coins at all dating to the late 17^th and first half of the 18^th centuries along the Route 301 corridor are rare as bartering for goods and services was more the norm in this rural area.   

                                                                                Halfpenny-William-III

Sheet Midden at the Noxon Tenancy, with Pottery and a Pig Jaw

The crew from the Louis Berger Group is back in the field in Delaware, this time at the Noxon Tenant Site. The Noxon Tenancy is a small farm site dating to around 1750, in a field not far from Armstrong Corners. Since this spot was part of a huge property belonging to a wealthy speculator, the people who lived at the site must have been tenants.

http://www.deldot.gov/archaeology/us301/pdf/handouts/Handout_draft.pdf

We started our work on Monday. After digging a few more test units, we brought in a backhoe to remove the rest of the topsoil from the site. We were chased off the site by the Nor’easter on Wednesday afternoon and didn’t get back to work until Friday. After a day and a half, we had exposed about half the site.  Removing the plowed soil exposed dozens of features on the site. These included what looks like a well, two small cellar holes, and several pits.  One of the features is what archaeologists call a “sheet midden”, a wide, thin deposit of trash. These form when people just throw their trash out into a yard or down a slope, rather than burning it or burying it in pits. This one is full of pottery and animal bone, just the stuff for learning about the lives of the people who lived here 250 years ago.  We’ll have the backhoe on the site again on Monday, finishing up this work and exposing more exciting things.

Pit Feature, Dark from all the Charcoal in the Soil

Well, November started out on a good note for Hunter Research, Inc.  The Elkins B site survived Hurricane Sandy and with each and every shovel full of soil from our cellar hole we are finding new and interesting artifacts which help us to better understand the folks who lived on this property in the first half of the 18^th century.  Screening the cellar fill through 1/8 inch mesh has been difficult due to the sticky nature of the clayey silty soils which make up the majority of the fill.  In an effort not crush the tiniest of artifacts lying within the soil we made sure NOT to be aggressive pushing the soil through the mesh, saving what would not go through the screens easily for soil floatation.  Floatation involves the immersing of the soil samples in a large 55 gallon drum, at which point the heavy fraction (the heavier particles) sink to the bottom and are collected on window screen while the light fraction floats to the top of the water and is collected in a runoff bag.  The amount of material collected  was staggering, filling trays with thousands of tiny items, which the laboratory staff must now pick through on rain days.  Well while waiting for the site to dry out a bit on Wednesday we had our first opportunity to process some of the float samples and pick through a small portion of the heavy fraction.  To our surprise we are finding tiny seed beads made from glass and what appears to be ceramic.  The sample also contained more straight pins, egg shell, fish scales, bones,  bits of tin enameling, daub (burnt earth used between logs of the structure), and what appears to be burnt seeds!