Planning for next year

While our Preserve America grant remains tangled in red tape, it is important that we start thinking about next year. What kinds of sites do we want to further explore? Where will our funding come from?

I will not bore our readers with funding details, but thought I would reflect on a couple of possibilities on what we might look at and who might help us look.

The early cemetery discovered in October of 2007 and confirmed last June is one obvious site to pursue. We have no intentions of digging up human remains, but delineating the cemetery and finding the church associated with it would help us learn something about the changing layout of the town.

The aboriginal component that we began exploring in June has revealed both an early 18th-century house with a cellar and what appears to be a Contact period Indian site. Expanding the excavation to search for an aboriginal house and other features, and delineating the earthfast Colonial house will raise a variety of new questions about European-Indian relations and early Colonial development, as well as produce biological and sedimentological data on the changing environment.

To help us with these, and other, projects, we look to two sources of energetic labor: the Archeological Society of Maryland and college students from around the country. At the September 6 board meeting of ASM I will formally invite the Society to return to Port Tobacco for the annual field session. On September 5, I will discuss the possibility of a field school with my department chair at Stevenson University.

These are possibilities for next year. We'd still like to mount an effort in the fall (apart from the anticipated work funded under our elusive Preserve America grant) and, perhaps, some winter survey work in the wooded areas surrounding the Edelen family fields south of town. As always, all comers are welcome to join us. Archaeology, after all, is a team sport.

Tomorrow I hope to post a new survey regarding research interests.

Jim