Beginning on Monday, April 27th and continuing for the next 11 weeks, archaeologists will once again be outside working onsite at Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home. Our current excavations are centered on an eighteenth-century kitchen located on the north side of the work yard approximately 50 feet from the main house. This wood-framed building, 16’ by 16’ in plan with an Aquia stone foundation and full cellar, would have been a hub of activity on the farm landscape and understanding its place within this landscape is important to our interpretation of life on the Washington farm.
Figure 1. Our kitchen site is located beneath the blue tarp just northeast of the main house.
We began last year’s excavation season by uncovering and exposing the entirety of the site, which had been sealed 28 years ago with a protective layer of sand. Exposed was a 16’ square stone foundation to a cellar filled with burnt household and architectural debris. For our excavation plan, we divided the cellar fill into four quadrants and were able to excavate two of them down to the level of the cellar floor over the course of our season. One of the quadrants had previously been excavated in the 1990s, leaving one more quadrant to dig this summer.
Figure 2. The eighteenth-century kitchen stone wall foundation, intruded upon by twentieth- century concrete foundations.
From the burned fill came an unexpected bounty of artifacts. Hundreds of fragments of glass wine bottles and ceramic storage containers were sifted through our screens, along with buckets of burned architectural debris such as plaster, mortar, and wrought nails of all sizes. A smaller number of more delicate artifacts also surprisingly survived, such as straight pins, animal bones, leaded tableware glass, buttons, box hinges, small copper drawer pulls, and even a concentrated deposit of eggshells!
Figure 3. A large wine bottle base being excavated out of the kitchen cellar fill.
Excavation also continued outside of and around the kitchen foundation as we searched for additional clues to the architectural footprint of the building. From these units we found artifacts ranging in age from 6500 BC to modern day. Native American projectile points and flint-knapping debitage, colonial-era ceramics, Civil War bullets, and twentieth-century household remains were all dug up in the various soil layers covering this part of the site.
Our archaeology lab has been very busy for the last nine months cleaning and sorting all the artifacts that were found last summer. Understanding the types of artifacts found will aid in our interpretation of how the building was used, its construction details, its role in the farm landscape, and, hopefully, the date it burned down!
Figure 4. Glass wine bottles and stoneware crocks are washed and dried in the lab before being sorted and catalogued.
Our field crew will be on site weekdays from April 27th to July 10th. Once again students from the University of South Florida will be here to learn the basics of archaeology field work during the months of May and June. We welcome all visitors to ask questions and enjoy the opportunity to help us sift for artifacts!
Archaeology is trash. There, I said it. Before you call Mr. Jones and have me thrown in a pit of snakes, let me explain. Generally speaking, archaeology focuses on understanding the past through the items that people left behind, i.e., their trash. Most of the things we find are left around because they were broken or no longer needed. Disposal of these items looked much different before modern garbage collection as we know it today. Rather than trashcans and landfills, trash was often thrown outside of the home or workspace near windows and doors or any other designated disposal areas. These areas, also known as middens, usually have a high number of artifacts and are top-tier when it comes to understanding a site. So, in other words, archaeology is trash, and we love it.
Most people can get behind the archaeologists saving the trash that’s hundreds or thousands of years old, but things are a little different when it comes to saving more modern materials like plastic. When visitors or volunteers see things like plastic bottle caps or food wrappers in our bags to bring back to the lab, they usually have a few questions. Like, “Did you mean to keep this?” Or “Why are you keeping this trash?” Here at Ferry Farm, we don’t pick favorites, every bit of trash can tell us something about the site and how it has been used.
One-way modern materials can help us understand a site is by helping us determine the Terminus Post Quem (TPQ), or “time after which,” of a layer. The TPQ is determined by identifying the earliest production date of the most recently produced item. For layers deposited before the widespread use of plastics, ceramics are usually used for determining the TPQ because they are datable (temporally, not romantically) since most have very specific production dates, and they also hold up pretty well under ground. For example, when looking at the ceramics in a layer with tin-glazed wares, Buckley, and creamware, the TPQ would be 1762 since that is the earliest production date of the most recently produced ceramic (creamware). All the items in the layer had to have been deposited after that date.
The same idea works with modern synthetic materials like plastics, which are usually found at sites that have been used within the last 100 years. If there were to be some plastic soda bottles, weed eater line, and styrofoam in a layer, the TPQ would be 1978. While these materials may also be items you have in your home, not thought to be worth collecting and preserving, their presence in a layer helps provide a date. They can also tell us if an earlier layer was disturbed.
When archaeologists talk about disturbed layers, we aren’t judging their emotional state or love of 2000s heavy metal. Instead, when a layer is described as disturbed, that means there was some sort of activity happening after the initial deposition that affected that layer. During last season’s dig, there were layers with a mix of colonial, prehistoric, and modern materials that indicated that the area was disturbed by some subsequent activity. The information gathered by the presence of modern materials is important for the interpretation of the site and its use over time.
Example of a disturbed layer– Artifacts include prehistoric flakes and fire-cracked rock, colonial items like tobacco pipe stems, Civil War Minie balls, and modern-day plastics
Now that we know why we keep this so-called modern trash. Here are a few examples of how the presence of these items helped our archaeologists understand a part of our site.
My favorite example happened during last year’s dig. One of our crew, Abbie, was preparing a feature for photographs and had to keep clipping pesky hairlike roots that were in the way. After a bit of excavating, it turns out the “roots” were bristles from a plastic broom. The broom dated the feature fill to the late 20th century and got to the root of the hairy soil issue.
Pesky broom in feature
Our staff has numerous examples of these modern materials being used to help identify previous archaeology as well, from candy wrappers at the bottom of shovel test pits and trenches to an entire trowel! While things like plastic trash bags and food containers aren’t the most exciting to find, they play a part in interpreting the history of activities on the site.
Once something is left behind, it becomes part of the archaeological record, whether it was 10,000 years ago or yesterday’s lunch. What does your trash say about you?
It’s that time again! As we welcome Fall and the beautiful cool weather it brings, let’s take a look back at our Summer 2023 dig season here at Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home. This year’s dig actually involved excavating two separate areas, designated FF-38 and FF-40, within the historic area.
Location of the archaeological projects FF-38 and FF-40 at Ferry Farm.
Project FF-38
The FF-38 area contained a large, dark, soil stain that was discovered by accident during the monitoring of a utility trench in 2016. Only a portion of this feature was visible at that time as it continued beneath the south wall of the trench. We had clues as to the approximate date of this partially-exposed feature, but we still needed to fully uncover the entire feature to establish its total dimensions and determine its age, function, and how it relates to the surrounding landscape.
F.321 as seen in 2016 within the utility trench. Only the northern portion of the feature was exposed at this time. F.321 is outlined in red, and is intruded by a square, lighter-colored 19th-century feature (F. 324).
Our excavation began by the machine removal of two modern layers of gravel that overlay a thick 19th-century layer of plowed soil. The excavation area measured approximately 16 ft. by 20 ft. Our crew of archaeologists then slowly excavated down through the plowed layer until we could identify the boundaries of Feature 321. Fully uncovered, the exciting discoveries began.
First and foremost, we discovered the feature was much bigger than originally thought! What initially appeared in 2016 to be a 5’x7’ roundish feature turned out to be the northern tip of a large rectangle measuring 10’ by 16’. The size and shape alone of the feature shifted our interpretation from a small pit to something larger.
F.321 fully exposed before excavation (outlined in red). The intrusive feature, F. 324, has been partially dug out at the north end of the site.
Feature 321 was divided into four sections and our crew excavated both southwest and northeast quadrants. This excavation approach allowed us to determine that the feature was roughly 1’ deep at the center, with gently sloping sides, and filled with successive layers of soil and ash-filled deposits. These soil layers provided us with an awesome mix of artifacts which were used to nail down the feature’s end date to the middle of the 18th century. But establishing a date is only part of the process: artifacts can further help us identify the function of the feature as well.
F.321 after the southwest and northeast quadrants were excavated. Intrusive Feature 324 is outlined in green.
That being said, we are still unsure of what this feature actually is. Here is what we know so far. There is no hearth of chimney remains. Lack of a fireplace suggests it wasn’t a domestic dwelling, but it could be another type of plantation outbuilding, such as a storage building, shed, or barn. The edges are almost vertical, and the floor is relatively flat. There is no silt so the pit was covered while it was open. It is too regular to be a quarry pit used to harvest clay as a building material.
Even though we are still in the early days of analyzing the artifacts, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about a few great things we found. This feature had a little bit of everything: personal items, food-related items, architectural debris, domestic items, etc. The crowning glory of the excavation (in our humble opinion) would have to be the complete pipe bowl that was stamped with a maker’s mark that featured the letters “TD.” Other exciting finds include a clipped Spanish coin, sherds to a Westerwald ink well, shark teeth, and prehistoric pottery, just to name a few. This feature also contained a layer of ash that preserved delicate artifacts such as bone, fish scales, and straight pins – items that often don’t survive in the archaeological record.
So what does this all mean? Well, this means that we will definitely be returning to the FF-38 site next season. While we have gathered a lot of information during this dig, there is still much left to find. Expanding our excavation beyond the limits of the feature and excavating one of the remaining two quadrants will help us interpret the feature’s function and how it relates to the 18th-century farm landscape of the Washington family.
FF-40
Wait, that’s not all for this year’s dig. Don’t forget that we had two excavation areas this year. Our second area was FF-40, which was the remains of an 18th century kitchen had experienced an intense fire. This kitchen was partially excavated in the 1990s, so this year’s excavation had more of an exploratory excavation designed to help us establish a game plan for future excavation. We knew the kitchen remains were below the foundations of two later farmhouses, and that the foundation walls of these farmhouses were still extant. Additionally, the interior of the foundations was filled with sand to protect the kitchen site. Our excavations confirmed the location of the farmhouse foundations and the existence of a protective layer of sand! Once our crew were able to get through this sandy fill, a quick clean of the kitchen fill uncovered artifacts that were absolutely toasty. Okay, toasty isn’t a technical term, but the artifacts showed evidence of a fire that burned at extremely high temperatures. This included a high number of architectural artifacts as well as charred ceramics and melted glass. Findings from this year will help guide the excavation in the future.
The burned kitchen site is located beneath these concrete house foundations dating to 1914. This picture was taken after protective sand fill was removed within the excavation unit.
Phew, that was a lot! That sums up our 12-week dig season. We answered a lot of our initial questions and found many more questions to investigate. Archaeologists will be in the lab the rest of the year processing artifacts, researching our findings, planning next season’s dig, and enjoying the A/C. Stop by the lab in the Visitor’s Center and take a peek at what’s happening. See you all in the field next May!
Lives & Legacies 