Chase House Excavation, Day Three

All of our diggers are doing great.  We continue to find broken bits of ceramics, glass, and animal bones.  We have also located several pieces of buried metal, which might turn out to be some interesting artifacts once they are better exposed.  Yesterday in the kitchen-ell unit Lauren, one of our field school participants, discovered a curved metal flower and Rebecca, another field school participant, continued to discover more parts to two tea cups in her unit.

We are still having a problem with flooded units, most likely due to the high water table.  We were able to pump some of the water out in hopes to see the bottom of the privy, but we could not keep up with the water.  Hopefully in a couple of days the water table will drop and we can get to the bottom of the privy.

Allen, one of Sheila’s volunteers, has been putting artifact information into a computer database.  Yesterday he reported that the Chase House excavations for 2008 and 2009 have uncovered over 20,000 artifacts and that he still has many artifacts to catalog!  It will be exciting to find out exactly how many artifacts were recovered from the Chase House once the dig wraps up.