Another exciting day of shovel testing at Richmond Hill! We collected some GPS points and excavated one test along the transect we laid in yesterday and one in the path of the new walkway.

The transect test produced a mixture of glass, historic ceramics, nails, and a couple of pieces of plastic including a vintage Listerine bottle cap (Listerine has been around since 1879!). While we seem to be outside of the intact, herring bone-pattern brick pavement the gardener has seen before, we believe we encountered a feature filled will brick, mortar, and a lot of slag and other burned materials like oyster shell and glass beneath the mixed fill about 50 centimeters below the ground surface. We’ll be back later to expose more of the feature to learn more about it.

The walkway test identified a thick layer of mortar beneath mixed fill about 25 centimeters below the ground surface. Beneath the mortar, another 10 centimeters of artifact bearing soil was excavated before coming down on sterile sandy clay subsoil. Each test is a clue to unravelling some of the mysteries of the history of life at Richmond Hill.

Pam Smith

We had a great first dig! This from archaeologist Tim Roberts from Cultural Resource Analysts:

“This morning we excavated one square, 50-x-50-centimeter-wide shovel test pit about 15 meters northeast of the slave house, careful to stay out of the beautiful garden plots. While we didn’t identify any archaeological features, we did recover a range of artifacts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and maybe a few quartzite flakes from pre-colonial stone tool-making, all from within the first 25 centimeters of the ground surface. We still have to clean and examine the materials back in the lab, but we know we have plenty of brick fragments, some terracotta pot sherds or drainpipe fragments, wire and cut iron nails, a piece of wrought iron hardware, green and colorless vessel glass, lamp glass fragments, burned animal bones, coal and slag, whiteware sherds, clay pipe bowl fragments, a glass marble, and few pieces of plastic and aluminum foil.”