Tuesday, June 2, 2009

A day of rest

The ASM field session is over. I gave the interns today off after a
week of non-stop travel and excavation. They went into DC to explore.

We were scheduled to start our Preserve America excavations tomorrow,
Wednesday, but we may push that back to Thursday. Unless I post
another blog today, consider Wednesday a day of too.

For all of June I can guarantee that we will be excavating in Port
Tobacco from Friday morning until Monday afternoon. Plan to join us if
you can.

-April
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April M. Beisaw

2 comments:

artifactjones said...

A day of rest, well deserved I would imagine. Can you explain more about the mission of this summer's project? It sounds like there were several different uses of the site over the years. Is this summer looking to explore just one particular use?

April M. Beisaw said...

The previous 11 days of fieldwork had several research goals: 1) to expose a colonial cemetery (no disturbance of graves) 2) to find the church associated with that cemetery, 3) to find the residence of James Swann, a free African American who ran a tavern in the town before the Civil War, and 4) to continue testing an area of dense Native American deposits to determine if the Contact period town of Potopac is within Port Tobacco itself.

Four weeks of excavation in June will focus on locating sites associated with Civil War period Port Tobacco and George Atzerodt, the resident hung for the Lincoln assassination.