2012 Summer Dig

All too soon my brief stint at this year's summer archeology dig has wrapped up...  The picture above shows part of the dig site on the first morning of excavation.  The 2012 summer dig is again being held at Historic Washington State Park (http://www.historicwashingtonstatepark.com/) near Hope, Arkansas.  We are on a city block that is now empty, but for much of the 1800s was the commercial district of the village of Washington.  For much of the early to mid-1800s, Washington was the major commercial and political center of this part of Arkansas, and was really on the frontier--until Texas joined the United States in 1845, southwestern Arkansas bordered a foreign nation...  Washington is about 30 miles from Texas, and until the railroads came to the region and shifted the commercial interests of the area to nearby Hope, it dominated the region.  In fact, when the Civil War raged in Arkansas and the Union Army captured the state capitol (Little Rock), the Confederate government in Arkansas moved to Washington, greatly swelling its population.  Below, two fellow Arkansas Archeological Society volunteers (Paul and Marilyn Knapp) look over one of the excavation areas located near a giant southern magnolia tree planted in 1839:

My excavation unit (the one next to the small red cooler, with the bucket and knee pad inside it) was placed along an area which was believed to hold some foundations from a building possibly built around 1850:

In the two days I dug at Washington this year, we found lots of the debris of life in the 1800s to the early 1900s, including many rusty nails, broken pieces of glass, broken pottery, other metal objects, bricks, and foundation stones.  One of the neater items from our unit was the broken glass label for an olive oil bottle, shown below:

Here is a close-up of our excavation unit, showing some of the bigger items we found--some large blocks of limestone quarried locally to build a foundation, plus some bricks and a large piece of flat metal in the lower left (the dark line along the right side is a gopher burrow):

After we dig about 4 inches, we'll clean things off, making them relatively "pretty" and smooth so that any features will stick out in the soil if they are present, and the archeologist in charge of this dig, Dr. Jamie Brandon, comes over and photographs the excavation unit:

While the vast majority of our finds date from between 1824 and 1930, sometimes much older items are found, such as the broken dart point I'm holding in the picture below:

This dart point is made out of stone called novaculite, which is quarried from the Ouachita Mountains in central and western Arkansas--you may remember that a number of years ago, I dug at some of these novaculite "workshops" near Hot Springs, Arkansas.  Even though I was only there a couple days, many neat things were found by all involved, and I had a great time.

We look forward to seeing many of y'all up north soon!!