Old Dirt – New Thoughts

St. Paul weather at 3:53 PM (Overcast 37 °F / 3 °C)

Today’s cold weather was well timed. No one in the class seemed disappointed to finish the excavations on a day when the blustery north winds made it feel almost like winter. Personally I like working outside when November turns stormy. It makes coming into a warm house (or a warm lab) feel so good.

I’m very pleased with our accomplishments. Although we didn’t find the church’s organ, we did discover a few new things about Hamline village history. Our lab phase will bring these discoveries into focus, but the stained glass and other architectural details are the most obvious of our finds. The project was also a success as a community archaeology dig and, at least so far, as an educational opportunity. Its great to see how far my students have progressed as field archaeologists in such a short time.

A collapse of our trench wall created the greatest challenge to our research goals. I almost gave up on trying to reach the church basement.

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^{Stained glass shards found along the church foundation.}

We’re finding a lot of small shards of colored glass. We believe these are from the rose windows. The interesting aspect is the diversity of colors – mostly greens and yellows, but also blue and amber colors. I just held them up to the sunlight a few minutes ago as I photographed some of them for this blog.  While snapping this picture I realized the symbolism. After 80 years of darkness, sunlight is again shining through the church’s stained glass windows.

Slowly, very slowly, the church ruin is coming into focus. After six weeks of digging (well, really we’ve worked about 45 hours on site) we are starting to see the scene of what remained in 1926 after the demolition work. We see sections of wall pushed over and bricks strewn about. Everywhere we’re finding limestone fragments.

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Wow, what a beautiful fall day! Plenty of sunshine and plenty of wind. The leaves were swirling around us and filling the pits as we dug. It felt really good to be outside doing archaeology on a day like today.

We continue to uncover more of the foundation. It has emerged as a substantial wall, over 50 cm (2 feet) thick. We’re also starting to hit rubble inside the building including small fragments of wood and lots of nails. I view these finds as a positive sign – that we’re closing in on the church interior and hopefully a glimpse of what might have survived the fire and demolition.

One of last week’s highlights was being joined in our excavation by some fifty 6th graders from Hancock Elementary school. It was a great experience to work side by side with such enthusiastic kids. As expected, we found some nails, ceramics, clinker, bricks, and lots of worms.

The only glitch in the entire day was when we lost Rayna. I never did get the entire story, but apparently one of the teacher’s aides thought Rayna was a 6th grader and made her go back to Hancock with the rest of the class. We eventually straightened out the mix-up and had Rayna returned to us. To avoid similar problems in the future, we’re asking Rayna to carry some form of ID whenever we have young kids on the site.

^{Rayna happy to return to our class}

A drenching rain brought today’s excavation to a screeching halt. I wasn’t too disappointed, though, since we were near the end of our class period and we’d been very productive before the rain. We are now largely done with the public component of our project and really focused on the research goals. Our units inside the church are down 80 cm (about 2 ½ feet) with no sign of any building debris. We need to dig fast and furious if we’re to get deep enough to really evaluate what is left inside the basement.

Our trench extension has uncovered a little more of the foundation, but it’s jumbled and not in line with our first section. It’s a little frustrating to be so close to seeing a longer stretch of foundation, but having to wait until Thursday’s class before we can dig again. Archaeologists always say that our profession requires patience, but only working 3 hours a day, two days a week makes for slow progress even by my standards. This nasty rainy, cold and dreary weather worries me a bit. Will winter wait a few more weeks so we can finish the dig, or is time running out?

Our Homecoming open dig was a lot of fun. Our timing was fortunate, with one of the nicest days we’ve seen this week. I was impressed by our returning volunteers – they knew what to do and started working as soon as they arrived. I had it easy. I just went around talking to people and everyone else did all the hard work. Public archaeology certainly has its advantages.

Maya had the find of the day – a metal enamel cup, slightly crushed but otherwise intact. She found it in a thin lens of ash and coal. The lens appears to be a trash dump, presumably from a coal burning stove. Stratigraphically it post-dates the church, but it indicates some refuse disposal was incorporated into the fill over the church.

It was a great day for Hamline area historians. We had a lot of conversations about the early church history, local architecture, and future sites to dig. All the possibilities are intriguing, I just need to convince Hamline that I should start offering Excavating Hamline History every semester instead of every other year.

We’re expanding our excavations. At the church site we have added a “T” extension on the west end of our trench that will expose a longer section of the church’s foundation. We want to better document the building’s location and construction. We also are hoping to find more artifacts – especially anything with architectural details. We’ve started to on-cover a mass of fragmented red brick, mortar, and wood. It’s all in a jumble as if it was thrown up against the outer wall during demolition. This pile of debris is important because it indicates we are close to the original ground surface. Everything we find in this strata are likely to be objects from the time of the church.

We’re also expanding the locus of our excavations to include the red brick house across the street. This colonial-style house was built in 1884 and is amongst the earliest houses still remaining in the Hamline neighborhood. Assuming the house occupants were home in December 1925, they would have been some of our best witnesses to the fire at the Methodist church. We’ll be digging in the backyard and hoping to find features and artifacts from the early days of this house’s existence. This dig will be our first exploration of a domestic site. The contrast of this excavation with our digs at institutional sites (the church and the university) should provide a broader understanding of life in Hamline village 100 years ago.

We found the church! At least we found a possible foundation located where the west wall of the church should be. It’s not as substantial a construction as we expected – so we have a lot of questions to answer and more digging to do. Archaeology almost always works this way. You may or may not find what you are looking for, but you always end up with more questions than when you started.

^{Natalie documenting the wall. It doesn’t look like much in this picture, but it is the linear mass in the foreground with a limestone block on top of it.}

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We had a very nice turnout for our first open dig. About 30 people showed up – including some enthusiastic kids. The sun made for a gorgeous autumn day – perfect for digging, especially for drying our muddy soils. The gravel fill in the second level (10-20 cm below surface), however, made the digging tough. I didn’t hear any complaints. Possibly the cookies and apple cider helped compensate for the sore trowel hands.

Our finds today were pretty sparse. Among the most interesting to me is the scatter of ash and coal, probably the refuse from a coal burning stove or furnace. We need to find out when people in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood stopped using coal, but this material suggests our fill comes from a site area dating to the mid-20th century or earlier.

The biggest question in my mind right now is if we should switch to shoveling out the fill. We could dig faster and get to the church foundation quicker. It’s a tempting thought.

^{BAG #001 – The first bag of excavated artifacts from our 2007 dig.}

We excavated the first level at the Hamline Methodist Church site today. We’re digging through a layer of rocky fill with a light scatter of 20th century artifacts. Some nails, slate shingle fragments, a limestone suggest we have building demolition debris, but are these from the church or some other structure? We need to keep digging to find our answer.

Ryan made the find of the day – a white ceramic sherd with a prominent maker’s mark. It’ll be interesting to see if we can identify the mark.

This Saturday is our first open dig. Stop by between 9 AM and 3 PM if you want to check out what’s happening.
^{Ryan’s find of the day}

Today we started the Hamline Methodist Church excavation. We managed to strip the sod from our first trench in between rain showers this afternoon.

There’s a lot of gravel and rock immediately below the sod layer. We also noted a few shards of bottle glass and a lot of worms. The weather report for Thursday looks decent – so with a little luck we should make good progress.

Saturday (Sept. 22nd) from 9 AM until 3 PM is our open dig for the Hamline neighborhood. Everyone is encouraged to stop by to see what we’re finding. You can even help dig or screen if you don’t mind getting muddy.

I’m back from Aniakchak. I arrived in St. Paul yesterday morning after 12 hours of travel. (We essentially went from Aniakchak Lagoon to Minnesota without stopping – except to change planes). It was/is a great field season (Ross, Gina, Caleb, and Kelly are still at the site working for another 10 days).

We found some interesting features including this nice big pile of fire- cracked rock and wood.

Gina excavating F103.

As usual, we excavated a lot of shell midden – enough to keep all my Hamline archaeology students busy for the next year sorting and cataloging. We made several interesting discoveries – which I’ll write more about over the next couple of weeks. I need to first take care of my emails, phone messages, and all the dreaded University paper work. I wish I were back in Aniakchak right about now.

This summer looks exciting for Hamline’s archaeology program. We have at least nine ten students working on seven projects in four countries. I have three students coming with me to Aniakchak for the month of July. Three Four other students will be working on projects elsewhere in the United States. The remaining three students will be in Belize, Greece, and Israel.

I’ve asked everyone to post comments on this diary whenever they get a chance. It’ll be really interesting to get some reports from the field. We should probably have a contest for the most amazing find, the best feature excavation, and the most challenging day.

I’d also like to hear about life in the field – what do you eat? Are there nasty bugs or other little critters that make your life miserable? What do you do for fun when you’re not working on site?

Hopefully everyone will have a chance to post at least once or twice this summer. Email me photographs and I’ll add a picture to your comments. Have fun and find some goodies!

Field locations of Hamline’s archaeology students (summer 2007).