More on Eroded Site

Thursday I wrote about a highly eroded site that the GAC team tested in a Southern Maryland county. I thought that I would add a bit more on the subject. I continue to be cagey about the site and where it is located because we are in the middle of a process. In any case, the specific location is irrelevant to the point.

In the map to the above you can see the site 18PR996 on top of a knoll and several artifacts that were recovered from the plowed surface some months ago. I noted in the earlier blog that we surface collected, shovel tested, metal detected, and excavated five 3 ft by 3 ft units. We exposed and excavated the very bottom portion of a pit with some ash in its fill. Clearly, at least one foot, and possibly several feet, of soil has been lost over the past couple of centuries, and especially during the 20th century.


In the photograph to the right, you can see the artifacts that we collected during all phases of field work. This isn't a sample...apart from some small brick fragments and some oyster shell fragments, this is everything we recovered. In fact, the probable fuel line (#5) and the bolt (#3) are machine parts, likely from a 20th-century tractor.

Clearly there was a house on the site, but surely it was built with more than a few nails (#s 1, 2, 4, and 7) and furnished with more than a few bits of ceramic (#s 6, 7, and 8).

Identifying the locations of these early 19th-century house sites has research value, but we are unlikely to get much more information out of them...they are lost.

Jim