New Discoveries Made with New Friends and Old

I'm co-opting Peter's space today...he can write about artifacts tomorrow.

This weekend's effort was a roaring success: we found several buildings, including a probable earthfast house--built on posts rather than a brick or stone foundation--dating to the 18th century and well outside of the town core. We collected about three bushels of artifacts, each and every bag of which corresponds to a specific shovel test pit that was mapped by Tom Forhan and Scott Lawrence and their CAT trainees. We hope to set up a volunteer lab at the Maryland Historical Trust (Crownsville) as early as this week.

On behalf of April, Pete, Scott, and myself, I want to extend thanks to:
Sheila Geisert for arranging overnight accommodations and the marking of underground utilities;
Sheila Smith for providing 40 people with lunch on Saturday and her many other kindnesses;
Dr. Charlie Hall of the Maryland Historical Trust for his inestimable help and good humor;
My wife, Bonnie Persinger, for shelving her own work for a day to help work with our volunteers, many of whom were first-timers;
And, of course, the great people who joined us those last three days and helped us achieve far more than we had hoped to achieve.

I hope that we will return to the field soon and that all of you will join us again. In the meantime, we have a lot of washing, cataloguing, data entry, analysis, and reporting to complete. Without completing these critical tasks, we cannot intelligently move ahead with the investigation.

Jim