Sharing Archaeology On The Web

One of the events that I attended at the SAA conference this week was a roundtable luncheon on sharing archaeology on the web. Our small group discussed what we were each doing, and planning to do, to help bring our projects to the public. Our moderator was Dr. Steve Black, editor of the Texas Beyond History website. One of the topics that we spent a lot of time discussing was the use of video on websites, something the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project has yet to do. There is a lot of archaeology video on the web, one example being the Archaeology Channel website, so we want to be sure we have something new to contribute before we begin that process. I think developing the wiki is more important right now but we may take video of the Archeological Society of Maryland Field Session at Port Tobacco, this June, as a first step in bringing another perspective of Port Tobacco to you.

-April

Late Night Report from Vancouver

The Society for American Archaeology conference is winding down.
It's 11pm in Vancouver and Jim and I fly back to our respective homes tomorrow.

Today, I presented a paper entitled "Memory and Identity within Late Prehistoric Cultures of the Susquehanna Valley". It summarized a portion of my dissertation research on the Engelbert Site in New York State. Here I identified an unusual mortuary ritual that can be interpreted as either a Susquehannock claim to Iroquois ancestry or to the land that the Iroquois one controlled.

Tomorrow Jim will present a paper on Late Archaic sites in the Chesapeake.

When I get home it is time to start preparing my (Archeological Society of Maryland) Spring Symposium talk about Port Tobacco. It will take place on April 12th in Annapolis.

-April

The Excavation of a Virginia Courthouse

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Brian Bates of Longwood College at an archaeology conference. Brain was presenting a poster on his excavation of "Thomas Jefferson's Lost Courthouse" in Buckingham, Virginia, and later sent me a copy of his report.

The "lost courthouse" was designed by Thomas Jefferson, but, like our original courthouse in Port Tobacco, no drawings or images of the courthouse are known to exist today. Brian and his team conducted archival and archaeological analyses in an attempt to discover what Jefferson's courthouse would have looked like, inside and out.

Below is their best guess of the courthouse exterior. While it does differ from the reconstructed Port Tobacco courthouse in overall style, it is similar in its two wings, each with its own front-facing door and window, and its main building, peaked at the center at a third floor attic.

-April

MAAC Conference, Part Deux

Today was the final day of the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference. Jim and Peter presented papers on research in Prince George's County, Maryland (north of Port Tobacco's Charles County).

Jim's paper was entitled "A Burned Earthfast House in Prince George's County, Maryland". The house is part of a site called Garrett's Chance #2 (18PR703 is the official site number). Evidence recovered during excavations at the site suggest that a Dutch-style jambless hearth heated the house and may have been the source of the fire that destroyed the structure in the 1730s or 1740s.

Peter's paper was entitled "Single Component Late Archaic Sites in Prince George's and Cecil Counties, Maryland". The sites, Octoraro Farm (18CE16) and Accokeek Point (18CE16), were small, under 100 feet in diameter, and located along relict stream channels. Despite their similarities, one site was rich in artifacts and the other had small artifact yields. Peter disucced the need for proper sampling intervals in order to identify these low-density sites to gain an increased understanding of Maryland's Late Archaic time period.

Both Jim and Peter did an excellent job with their presentations and were worth getting up early on a Sunday morning...after a night of dancing. I wont say who was dancing, just that some of were alseep way too early in the evening for the last night of a conference...and it probably wasn't who you thought it may be.

-April

Life is a Beach

Three-fourths of the PTAP team, and at least one of our volunteers, are enjoying a cold and windy weekend in Ocean City at the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference.

We are taking in presentations on all aspects of regional archaeology and were looking forward to one talk in particular, entitled "Why Salisbury: The Development of Maryland's Second Largest Port" by Jennifer Gardner.

Jennifer is in the early stages of this research but there are obvious overlaps with our work. Where Port Tobacco declined when the railroad failed to include it on its route, Salisbury increased in prominence when it gained the railroad to compliment the port. We will be keeping tabs on this project.

Peter and Jim are giving talks tomorrow. I will report on those then.

-April

Raiding the 17th Century Chesapeake

Lois Carr's 1974 piece, The Metropolis of Maryland: A Comment on Town Development along the Tobacco Coast seeks to understand the sparsity of 17th century Chesapeake towns. In the end, she concludes that "the costs of centralizing the tobacco trade were higher than the benefits and that this fact hindered the growth of towns along the Chesapeake" (pg 144). But, she also places blame on a Native American group, the Susquehannocks, and their raids for limiting town development.

It just so happens that the Susquehannocks have become a research specialty of mine. The Susquehannocks are an enigmatic group in that they are clearly present in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the 1600s but their pre-Lancaster history is a topic of much debate. The Susquehannocks are believed to have moved down to Lancaster, from northern Pennsylvania and southern New York, beginning in 1550. On their 30-year journey they massacred the local Shenks Ferry people, set up short-term residence in the Shenks Ferry villages, adopting and marrying those they spared. The reason for this long distance migration and conquest was to gain better access to European trade and to move away from their enemies, the Five Nations Iroquois.

What's my take on this story? I don't believe it.
At the Society for Historical Archaeology conference earlier this month, I found out that I am not alone.

There is mounting evidence to suggest that the migration and the massacre did not occur, at least not as outlined above. In fact, the Susquehannocks and the Shenks Ferry are probably one in the same. The Susquehannocks have long been cast as the marauders of the region. I think this will change soon.

-April

Carr, Lois Green
1974 The Metropolis of Maryland: A Comment on Town Development along the Tobacco Coast. Maryland History Magazine, pp. 124-145. vol. LXIX.

Smarter Principals

April and I have returned from the annual conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology, April to the frozen wastes of the north, me to the balmy clime of Southern Maryland. I think we both learned much and I expect to see some of that new found wealth of knowledge brought to bear on Port Tobacco. The theme of the conference was The Public Benefits of Historical Archaeology and I participated in two sessions dealing with those issues. Port Tobacco, a preeminently public archaeology project, will benefit.

While we were gone, our learned colleagues Pete and Scott expounded on several topics. I wanted to address one of those: Scott's piece on Barton W. Stone (1772-1844). Stone, you will recall, was born in Port Tobacco and went south to North Carolina to study under David Caldwell. As it happens, back in 1979 I think, I worked on the David Caldwell Log College site in Greensboro, North Carolina. This is the place where Caldwell lived in the very early 19th century and where he convened his school. Stanley South, one of the fathers of modern historical archaeology, had conducted an archaeological excavation there some years earlier.

We found the remains of his house and a variety of features, some jam-packed with bone. We even recovered a glass inset from a pair of cuff links. The inset had LIBERTY in raised letters on the back side. The letters were reversed so that when the glass was fixed to the cuff link (probably pewter or silver) the word and sentiment were clearly understood.

It's been a long time, and I don't think I ever saw the report, although I know there was one, so I don't have the details at hand. I recall from our historical research that Caldwell was a rabid anti-Catholic, supporting the exclusion of Catholics from public office. Barton Stone may have absorbed that prejudice. If so, it is well that he didn't bring them back to Port Tobacco...or did he?

Jim

Society for Historical Archaeology Conference

To give you all a better idea of what Jim and I will be doing at the conference, here are excerpts from our itinerary.

Jim has co-organized a session on public archaeology that is being presented on-line and will be a panelist in two other sessions. He will be talking about Port Tobacco in a session on historical ecology.

I will be presenting a paper on my research into the history of the Susquehannocks and meeting with the publisher of our book, The Archaeology of Institutional Life.

To my dismay, it will probably be warmer in Binghamton than in Albuquerque for the few days that I will be there. Is it summer yet?

-April

Odds and Ends

Flickr
You probably noticed the new slideshow in the left column. I've started uploading project photos to our new Flickr.com account. You can click n an image in the slideshow to pause it and go backwards or forwards too. Alternatively you can go straight to our Flickr page (http://flickr.com/photos/porttobaccoarchaeology ) to see all the photos and comment on them. We will be adding descriptions soon.

Photo Poll
Speaking of photographs, I want to thank everyone who voted in the photo poll. Since the 1st and 2nd place photos were separated by only a few votes, I decided to submit both of them to the contest. The voting for the official contest will happen at the Society for Historical Archaeology conference in early January. I'll let everyone know how our photos place.

New Poll
There is a new poll question.

Newspaper Coverage
Port Tobacco was part of another Maryland Independent article. You can read it here. Our own Jim Gibb is quoted throughout. Here is a snippet:

Amateur archeologists contribute to the preservation of Southern Maryland’s history. More than two dozen volunteers joined archeologists during the past few months to help do the initial survey at Port Tobacco. The volunteers helped archeologists clean, analyze and record information for a report intended to convince the state, Charles County government and local residents to pitch in financially and physically to keep the project in motion.‘‘It’s really important to build up steam on this,” he said. ‘‘We need consistent commitment of local funding to really make this thing happen. This is a long-term project.”

So far, the excavation has uncovered 15 boxes filled with a variety of artifacts, Gibb said.

"Given the fact that we’re just doing a shovel test, it’s extraordinary,” he said. "There wasn’t a single test unit that didn’t produce at least one artifact. Some units produced a couple of gallon-sized bags full. That’s a lot to come out of a little hole.”

More on the Square

April is still hobnobbing with her fellow wizards in Washington, DC...the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association. We expect her to return to us all the smarter for having gone. While awaiting her return, I offer this little bit more on the excavation of TP3 in front of the courthouse where, as you will recall from yesterday, we are trying to determine the age of the town square. Had it been there as long as the courthouse, or was it a later development modeled on New England town squares in the wake of the centennial (1876) celebration?

The photograph above shows the mortared brick foundation along the east edge of the unit. The drawing illustrates the profiles of the West and North walls. The excavators were very conservative in removing the soil, resulting in eight identified strata, including the brick foundation. The Munsell soil color values (e.g., 10YR3/3 is dark brown) and soil textures suggest that A & B and F & G could be combined into two layers. The dates included with the soil descriptions are based on my review of the artifact catalogue.

Strata F and G contain prehistoric and Colonial materials. The layers above formed during the 19th and 20th centuries. The little bit of masonry rubble (common red soft mud brick and lime mortar) in those lower layers suggest that the brick foundation may date to the Colonial period, while the large quantity of masonry rubble in Strata B and C suggests that the structure was demolished late in the historic period.

Based on this small unit, we cannot stay definitively whether this is an 18th-century building or a 20th-century building constructed of cannibalized brick; but the artifacts strongly suggest that this part of the site was occupied in the 18th century.

Jim