Lives and Legacies

Tag: trash midden

  • One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s TPQ: Modern Materials in Archaeological Excavations

    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?

    Danielle Arens

    GWF Archaeologist

  • 2024 Dig Preview!

    Spring is in the air. The weather is warming up, flowers are blooming, bees are buzzing, and of course the dig season is about to start here at Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home.

    As part of the 2023 dig season, our team revisited the site of a colonial-era kitchen that had experienced a particularly destructive fire sometime in the middle of the 18th century. The kitchen’s foundation, as well as the surrounding landscape, had been compromised by the construction, and subsequent destruction, of two farmhouses that were built directly on top of everything. This site (FF-44) is located about 50 feet from the northeast corner of the Washington House.

    Location of this year’s dig at the colonial kitchen site (FF-44)

    The 18thC kitchen site was initially explored as part of an archaeological assessment of the Ferry Farm historic property in the early 1990s. The structure and its contents were originally interpreted as a house, but a reevaluation of the excavation notes and artifacts several years later reinterpreted this site as a kitchen, not a primary domestic dwelling. But research queries still exist, such as narrowing down the dates of construction and destruction of the structure, as well as determining the possibility that meaningful artifact deposits and landscape features that might help bolster the interpretation of the building still exist outside of the foundation.

    Location of the 18thC kitchen in relation to later 19th and 20thC farmhouses

    With these questions in mind, our efforts last summer focused on working out a game plan for reexamining the site for our future excavations.  During our dig, we uncovered the southwest corner of the original kitchen as well as the foundation of the 20th-century farmhouse overlaying it. Re-locating the site and evaluating the amount and extent of fill were our primary goals. That completed, this year we will concentrate on investigating the landscape surrounding the foundation and reexamining the burnt fill within.

    Last year’s excavation. Red arrow points to area inside of the kitchen, white arrow points to area outside of the building. The stone and concrete wall is part of the 1914 farmhouse foundation, which sits atop the colonial kitchen fill.
    Lead excavator Sarah on floor of kitchen cellar

    An honest question you might ask would be why would we want to learn more about what was outside of the foundation? Isn’t all the important stuff inside? In the archaeological world, a lot of valuable information can be learned from these outlying areas. Eighteenth-century trash middens are often found outside of a building because garbage was being thrown off of the porches and out the doors and windows. Studying this everyday disposal of trash can tell us how and when a building was being used, as well as traffic patterns by those using the building.

    Another interesting feature that can be found outside of a foundation is a builder’s trench. These trenches were dug by the individuals building the foundation, and as they worked and backfilled these trenches, items they were currently using were accidentally left behind. These artifacts can be excellent dating material and can really nail down a construction date.

    Other items we will be looking for are possible supplementary building features, such as post-in-the ground foundations and fences. Additionally, taking a second look at the site will help us better understand the previous archaeology that was done over thirty years ago.

    As for the exciting second site we started excavating last year, Feature 321, we are putting that project on hold for now and concentrating our efforts on the kitchen site. But work continues in the lab on all the interesting artifacts recovered during last summer’s dig.

    This year’s dig begins April 29thand ends July 12th.  Archaeologists are working on site from 8 am until 4 pm, Monday through Friday, and we gladly welcome questions from our site visitors.  So be sure to stop by and see what exciting things we uncover!

    Danielle Arens and Judy Jobrack

    George Washington Foundation Archaeologists

  • Colonial Grossology [Video]

    Looking back in time, people’s personal hygiene, fashion choices, medical treatments, and more can seem disgusting.  When confronted with gross practices, our first reaction can be to dismiss our ancestors as primitive, ignorant, or just silly.  Before such judgments, however, we should try to understand the reasons behind these practices and recognize that our own descendants will judge some of what we do as gross.  Here at George Washington’s Ferry Farm and Historic Kenmore, we’ve come to describe our efforts to understand the historically disgusting as “Colonial Grossology.”  In this video, we examine three ways that daily life in the 18th century was sort of gross.

  • Lecture – The Social Role of Garbage in Colonial Virginia [Video]

    On Tuesday, May 21, 2019, Dave Muraca, Director of Archaeology at The George Washington Foundation, presented “The Social Role of Garbage in Colonial Virginia,” the final talk in this year’s annual lecture series. Dave presented three case studies in 18th century garbage disposal at George Washington’s Ferry Farm, Colonial Williamsburg, and Historic Kenmore.

    Thanks to the Fredericksburg branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library at 1201 Caroline Street in Fredericksburg, Virginia for hosting the series once again this year. To learn about other events and happenings, visit kenmore.org.