Tin Glaze Palooza!

Today was another day of excavation where all three interns' talents shone through. Magen was our paperwork guru, filling out paperwork and bags like nobody's business. When she wasn't filling out paperwork, Magen also ran the flotation tank. Katharine single-handedly dug all the way through plow zone (ok, single-handed may be an exaggeration. Our wonderful volunteers helped her out.) And finally, Allison was banned from ever digging a unit again after her unit refused to give up and became more and more complicated as the day progressed.
As mentioned previously, we were able to do flotation. Today we floated soil that came from Ann's trash feature. Floating separated the larger gravel from smaller particles. Floataion revealed that the trash feature contained large quantities of characoal.

Katharine worked on taking a unit down to find the rest of a brick platform that showed up a few days ago in the neighboring unit. Other than finding a thin sandbar that had to be mapped in, the stratigraphic makeup of this unit was fairly simple, just plowzone with some large brick pieces throughout. By the end of the day the rest of the platform was exposed and from what we can tell of is probably part of the support system for a building. We will try to use this to figure out the orientation of the building.

In Allison's unit, many pieces of tin-glazed ceramics were recovered in large pieces that we hope to be able to reconstruct. Other artifacts, such as bottle glass, glass stems, and burned oyster shell led Dr. Beisaw (who took over the unit due to it's complexity) to the conclusion that we have exposed a tavern.

As to the question "what are the bricks made of?", the answer is clay. It is difficult to say whether or not the bricks were made locally. This depends on the time period. If the bricks were from the colonial period they would have been made in a temporary kiln on site. After the advent of manufacturing, bricks can be traced because they were stamped with the manufacturer's mark.

Thanks to all who came out to help us today! We plan to be back out there tomorrow.