Putting Site to Bed

The GAC crew will be working on some other projects in Southern Maryland for the next month or two, curtailing our fieldwork at Port Tobacco. One of our tasks today was to put the site to bed, backfilling Unit 83, backfilling a portion of the exposed chimney at the Swann site, and putting away equipment.

We still managed to work for a few hours on Unit 83. There is no doubt that the foundation was razed and filled with a mixture of masonry rubble and 1960s domestic refuse, including a jar of Ban deodorant...the cream kind that users applied with their hand. We didn't open the jar...it is possible that we have some well-cured antiperspirant...a 1960s vintage. Below the masonry rubble, the domestic refuse seems to be diminishing and we hit a fair amount of ash and burned oyster shell.

I am confident that we have some historically interesting deposits in the bottom of the cellar, but we'll have to remove at least 2 ft of demolition debris and modern domestic trash before we can explore those early deposits. Based on the likely results of our analyses, we should be able to justify the use of a backhoe to clean out the recent material, thereby allowing more prudent investment of limited resources.

The crew will continue to report on results of our work at Swann House and at the other sites explored this past spring. The technical report on the ASM field session work should be ready by early December. As in the past, we will post the report on the Web.

Jim