Sorry for not updating in a long time. As I posted back in June, the remainder of the shovel test pit excavations went well, and we were able to wash, sort, and bag all of the artifacts recovered during the summer before I headed back to Berkeley. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been busy with starting up excavations on a new site, here on campus, with a great crew of undergraduate students – some of whom helped me process the artifacts found at the Gage House the previous summer. You can see our blog for this project here and our photos here.
Looking ahead to this coming summer, though, big things will be happening in terms of more work at the Gage House. In conjunction with my advisor, Laurie Wilkie, and fellow graduate student, Kelley Deetz, I’ll be offering an archaeological field school course this summer between July 2nd and August 10th entitled “The Archaeology of Slavery and Abolition.â€? The students will be split into two teams, and each team with spend three weeks at Kelley’s site, the Bacon’s Castle Plantation in Surrey, Virginia, and then another three at the Gage House.
As for excavating this summer, we’ll be focusing on the area of the no longer existing Gage woodshed behind the house. Based on the testing we’ve already done, we know that there is a significant concentration of artifacts where the woodshed used to be. We’ll be doing larger scale open-area excavation of this area this summer to look for more information regarding the woodshed, and to clear the area for its reconstruction later on in the summer. Once excavations of that area are completed, we’ll move on to doing additional testing and excavation of the area outside where the Gage’s kitchen was on the back of the house, especially underneath the modern additions that will be removed ahead of our work.
More information regarding the summer field school (called Anthro 134A Field Methods in Archaeology, with Dr. Wilkie) will be available here as soon as the website’s updated. Even though we’ll have a large crew of students, we still want local volunteers this summer, so stay tuned (those of you who have volunteered in previous summers can help show the undergrads what’s what!).