Gales and Haggis and Deep-fried Mars Bars

Since my last post, we lost a couple of days to a nasty front that passed over Bermuda and rendered it too windy to get across the harbour to work. Much of this time was spent indoors catching up on work while the students watched Swamp People and Pawn Stars on the Bizarre American Subcultures Channel (formerly known as the History Channel). I knew life had gone horribly wrong when they all started talking like Swamp People ("Gaytr! Shoot! Shoot 'em!"). But when the front passed through (just in time to save my sanity), it settled down amazingly quickly:

Saturday Morning

Sunday Morning

And let it be noted this was Father's Day weekend - If memory serves, a nasty storm sprang up about this time last year - good thing we weren't working and trapped on Smiths Island this time around...

Now, having Saturday cancelled was not met with loud lamentations, since we had seen that the second Bermuda Highland Games were to be held that afternoon. Amazingly, the squalls stopped and wind dropped around 1pm and by the time we got to Hamilton at 2:30, it was bright sun and actually quite hot! We were greeted by the sound of bagpipes as we stepped off the bus by City Hall and beat the parade to Saltus Field.

After the Halifax RCMP band and accompanying dancers had properly started the Games, Bermuda's Governor George Ferguson, clad in kilt, welcomed all and sundry

.

 We secured a good spot to watch the tug of war matches and the caber tossing. I couldn't resist trying the haggis and a deep-fried Mars bar with whipped cream - as did the more adventurous students.

Are those kilts regimental?

A captain speaks gentle words of encouragement
 to the RCMP team

Fukumi and Anima

Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day to dig, and we had surprisingly little water pooled up on our tarps or in our units. U of R student Fukumi was our guest digger - she had come down to study documentary film-making with Lucinda Spurling, but we borrowed her for the day to try to get to the floor of the front part of Oven Site...

...which defied our attempts as we discovered a hitherto unknown lower rubble layer... Seems like the front portion of the house we've entered has a lower floor cut than the back kitchen area. Jonathan spent the entire day clearing large blocks of stone and other rubble from the area we thought might be a bulwark or staircase. At the end of the day he had cleared nearly three feet of material - and still not quite gotten down to bedrock yet! 

In the main trench we continue to recover coarse tin-glazed earthenwares, more flakes of chert, lots of bones, some metal architectural hardware, and even a few pieces of unglazed Iberian earthenware. We found a large piece of a milkpan base, probably Metropolitan-ware (c. 1630-1660) in the new rubble layer under the various floors we've been digging through, which further confirms the dating of this house. It was trying enough to force a relapse in Swamp-speak at times ("darrun, diggen dem hur conticks, nar nar...") - forcing me to take evasive action.

Jonathan, Fukumi, and Anima: Armed and Dangerous

To arrest this slippery slide into Deliverance territory (and I mean the movie, not the ship!) we went over to Smallpox Bay to begin clearing around the cottage there in preparation for mapping and limited test excavations next week. We found the rusty hulk of an old car or truck right outside the front door - remains from the 1970s farming days. It was good therapy clearing away the sprawling Mexican pepper and allspice trees that surrounded the house. When I first scouting this location in 2009, it still had much of its roof but now all but one of the rafter pairs have fallen away and the slates have all fallen in. By the end of the day, we had a pretty clear view of the cottage and a good working area for establishing our local GIS grid. We hope to firm up the dating of this building (known to be standing in 1811) and its function: slave house? quarantine station? autonomous tenant?

Today (Monday) is Kristina's birthday, and my present to her was to make today our outing to the National Museum of Bermuda, rather than make her dig. We repeated our itinerary from last year, taking the fast ferry out to Dockyard and touring the Maritime Museum and archaeology lab (thanks, Jillian, for letting us in!) in order to see a wide variety of artifacts recovered from shipwrecks undergoing conservation treatment. The fully opened Shipwreck Island! exhibit is even more impressive than the sneak peak we got last year - now fleshed out with interactive touch-screens.  

The dolphins were also fun to watch.

And like last year, we ended the field day with a trip to the beach - this time Church Bay, which has fantastic snorkeling. (Warwick Long Bay would have been good, but probably with rough waves and quite crowded, since today is Heroes Day, a national public holiday in Bermuda (and entirely coincidental to Kristina's birthday).

We ended a very eventful day with a golf lesson from Jonathan (who is on the U of R team), who very patiently instructed us on how to use a nine-iron on the once fantastic but now overgrown St. George's Golf Course a short walk from our condo. As the sun set, we deposited a couple dozen balls in mostly random places (well, not Jonathan, who put them OVER the green we were aiming for) for future archaeologists to discover. Since Somers Market closed before we returned to St. George's, Kristina was left cake-less (not unlike me on my seventh birthday, spent in Yugoslavia - a long and bitter story...), so she got a candle on her home-made pizza instead. When in the field, your most important skill is improvisation...

Breakthroughs Galore!

Like American Football, archaeology can be a game of inches. When an archaeologist prepares to excavate a site, he or she imposes a uniform three-dimensional grid across the site in order to relate everything to each other - layers, features, artifacts. There is a nail in a tree at the Oven Site that is the center of our local universe - the zero point of all three planes. Although this grid is laid out along a north/south axis, the placement of the zero point is somewhat arbitrary. By the axiom of Murphy's Law, the corner, posthole, or other feature you predict a location for and seek will inevitably lie just outside the units you've excavated...

This week, the archaeology gods smiled upon us and our grid captured the very edge of what might prove to be an extremely important feature. While cleaning up the sidewalls of the unit where the bedrock cut signifying the front of the cut, we discovered a very narrow perfectly straight wall with a very pronounced offest rectangular cut at its end - which looks to me like the edge of a bulkhead ramp or stairway leading down into the quarried house floor. Today we opened up the adjoining unit (N2E6) to discern exactly what's going on here - stay tuned!

To the east of the front of the house, a strange feature emerged cutting into the bedrock and filled with compact brown loam. It did not intersect with the house front cut but seemed to predate it, since its orientation was at a 60-degree slanting angle to the north-south oriented floor cut. We opened another unit to the  east to define the dimensions of this puzzling feature and found that it kept going east through this square as well. In order to define what exactly we had here, we bisected the portion in N3E7 to see it in profile - and discovered that it was a shallow, irregular, and probably natural feature, with no artifacts in the fill layer - perhaps made centuries or millennia before our house was built. A much better outcome than it turning out to be a grave or some other nasty and complicated surprise...

Kristina having fun with rocks

Our third new development (in part to see how far the above feature extended) was to open a new unit to the north of the front house cut, both to follow this wall out and also because a projection from the north wall sections excavated last summer suggested we might find the northeast corner of the house in this square (or just north of it). So it was once more through the building destruction rubble layer...

... And when the rocks came out, we found another alcove-like feature carved into the front wall of the house - just like the one in the center of the western wall but more regular and cave-like than the shrine-like feature we found cut into the north wall last summer. The residents of the house clearly had some purpose in mind for making several of these types of features, but we are still at a loss as to what function they served.

We also excavated the occupation layers in the main trench and came up with a plethora of artifacts - mostly fish and mammal bones (very few birds), coarse red earthenware with a green lead glaze, a few pieces of delft, some dark bottle glass (case and round bottles), poorly fired brick fragments and - most significantly, another eleven chert stone flakes, reflecting past flint-knapping activity. This further supports the historically documented presence of Native American slaves within this household and our identification of the Oven Site as Boaz Sharpe's 1707 household. 
We also found what appears to be the broken tine of a fish-gig - a trident-like spear commonly listed in early Bermudian probate inventories used to kill fish from a boat.

Similar fish-gig in Carter House Museum

We've been blessed with many volunteers in the past few days. Over the weekend, Scott Amos and his daughter Kelsey helped us out, along with Alaina and Jason. Jillian was back Tuesday and today, and a former grad student of mine, Jim Hermann, came all the way from Penfield to get dirty.

Alaina and Jason

Jillian

Kelsey

Jim

And finally, fed up by her brief stay in the seventeenth century, Anima made use of our modern oven to bake two big batches of AMAZINGLY GOOD chewy chocolate chip cookies. Yum!

Don't you wish you were here?  We drank half a gallon of milk to get them down properly

Seventeenth-Century Day!

Last year after the students left, my family and I went on several adventures that got me thinking - what might we learn by trying to approximate the sites and activities of early Bermudian settlers? This experiential learning germ grew over the winter in my mind and by early May, I had an excellent day planned out. For the past two weeks, the students have been trying to ferret out of me what they'd be doing, and speculating wildly when I refused to tell. Were they to be marooned on Smiths Island? Or somewhere even smaller? Did it involve sailing? Planting tobacco? Hunting for ambergris?  On Sunday, the wait was over and we embarked on our Magical History Tour, Bermuda style...

Archaeologists' boat (above) vs. marine biologists' ship -
humanities vs. STEM funding levels...

We boarded our boat and set off for Ferry Reach - because traveling by water was the most common mode of transportation in the early decades (just ignore the V4 engine  in the stern) - destination UNKNOWN. After seeing the old ferry wharf, various forts, and shipbuilding sites along the way, we anchored at the Grotto Bay end of the Causeway and landed, ready to explore... Tom Moore's Jungle.

This part of Bermuda between Castle Harbour and Harrington Sound is geologically the oldest, full of rock outcroppings and caves and with very little flat ground. 1610s Bermuda Company investors complained so loudly that they each got an extra five acres of land in St. David's to compensate them for the difficult topography of their Hamilton Parish shares. Their servants they sent fought a losing battle to clear the land and to this day the area remains densely wooded and sparsely developed.

Our first two caves - partly filled with seawater

 Most of it is a Bermuda Government park and a Bermuda National Trust nature reserve, with a small tract in private hands - Tom Moore's Tavern, a very expensive, exclusive five-star restaurant in one of the earliest stone houses ever built in Bermuda (c. 1652). Our morning mission was to experience the forested landscape that early settlers would have encountered - and explore caves! 

And they were never seen again...

Jonathan and Kristina - and a few albino lobsters by their ankles

 After a very cool spelunk (if that's the right verb), we wended our way to a natural pool formed in the hollow made by a large collapsed cave... 
 ...which happened to have a convenient cliff from which to jump.

A flying U of R Professor!

Three of the five of us partook of briefly defying gravity (the Fricker family accrued much honour). Jonathan threw down the gauntlet in a splash off, which was caught on video - but which Blogger will not let me upload!

UPDATE: Posted to YouTube:

Who will win? Watch to find out - and note the excuses!!!

After drying off and having lunch, we upped our game to bigger and more extensive caves deeper in the forest.






The grand finale was a huge cave mostly filled with water that slants downward into utter darkness...

No gollum sightings, or Rings found - but lots of swimming

Afterwards, we emerged near Tom Moore's Tavern and saw this unique early building. Built around 1652 by Samuel Trott (the son of one of Bermuda's biggest landholders), the house has an unusual covered arched piazza flanking its original entry porch room.  


Note the tall narrow windows in this building - now sash but almost certainly originally diamond-pane casement windows like those on many 17th-century St. George's houses. From here we walked back to the boat via the main road, which just happened to take us past an ice cream parlour - and a slight lapse in our strict 17th c. dietary regimen.

The truly epic part of the day came around 4:30, when we really made the leap into the early 17th century. Readers of this blog may recall that last year's field school helped work on a c. 1612 settler house reconstruction to gain insights into timber-frame architecture. Well, this house is now finished and Rick Spurling very kindly allowed us to spend the night in it in order to get in touch with living in the distant past. We even found some reenactor's costumes  (a century or so off, but who's counting). Jonathan and Anima especially got into character! 

We had an early dinner, complements of Somers Market, from which I screened all foods that had no plausible historical precedents for 1620s Bermuda but, amazingly, a lot of that night's offerings passed muster. Besides soldier's bread (dark wheat), we had roast lamb, cassava bread, mashed potatoes (they arrived in Bermuda c. 1617), and ginger bread - eaten with only knife, spoon, mug, and bowl (no forks! how 18th century!) communally around the table.

Ravenously doth they fall upon the repast to slake their hunger.

The next challenge was making a fire without lucifer sticks (matches) and gathering wood to sustain us through the night. Leigh became our targeted thermo-optical specialist and succeeded!






With heat and light later assured, we banked the fire and walked to Clearwater Beach and Cooper's Island to catch a beautiful sunset - from the very spot that Christopher Carter (our Smiths Island hero) built his house after the Bermuda Company belatedly rewarded him for finding a fortune in whale barf (a long but very fun story).

It was fairly dark when we returned. In a very hobbit-like way, we embarked on preparing a second supper by candlelight on the open hearth. I had brought a variety of foods that early settlers would have had - flour, dried peas, potatoes, onions, carrots, salt cod, honey. We made a soup in the dutch oven and went stargazing on the hill behind Carter House while it simmered. Eating by candlelight was truly amazing, a great end to a challenging day.

Bedding was the last challenge we faced, since the Settler House had none. Historically, it would have had a half loft for its residents, but alas we had only a dirt floor. Jonathan said he only woke up once. Leigh said she didn't sleep a wink. The rest of us fell somewhere in between...

My makeshift bed - basically a Boy Scouts stretcher using a sheet

We had Monday off for all to recover and reacclimate ourselves to the 21st century: mostly we slept but a few who suffered internet withdrawal binged. We were back digging today and made some amazing finds, but that entry will have to wait until tomorrow...