I spent this morning at the historic house sorting through dirty bags of artifacts found during excavations under the house's floorboards a decade ago, in preparation for docent training on our new 5th-grade tour which will include a section on archaeology. It was great fun, even if most of the finds were uninteresting and, well, gross--like rat and mouse skulls and bones. But I liked finding even the ordinary bits of broken crockery, bent nails and pins, and buttons, even if their exact dates are uncertain, as least to me. I can picture the house's inhabitants and history more clearly through their odd bits of detritus.
It all reminded me of my time helping on an excavation of a Roman bathhouse near Carthage, Tunisia. There, we found vaulting tubes (to make ceilings), hypocaust tiles (to hold up the bathhouse floor), tesserae (from the mosaic floors), rainbow-colored glass (it gets that tint from being buried), and, my favorite find, a fragment of a small statuette of a Roman matron. It was hot, dirty, hard work with our heads by our ankles hours a day, garden trowel in hand, in the baking North African summer, with a short break for "cass croute" of dark chocolate and cookies. But our dig house had a view of the Mediterranean and a great cook, who made fantastic couscous with chicken, carrots, and potatoes steamed in a giant, battered washtub-like basin.
I think a dig in a New England summer might have been easier, if not quite as memorable, but if there was another one, I'd love to be there.
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| Just a selection of finds, including bits of pottery and glass, button, nails, bones and teeth, and oyster shells. |
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| A photo of the original excavation under the floorboards, where the above finds were discovered. |
Last Friday I was at an archaeoligist's talk on the Priory in Southampton, it dates to about 1200 but most of that is lost. For me there were two interesting things, the Prior could charge for burials in the Priory grounds, higher charges for sites closer to the building and they had flushing WCs, the multi holed seats were arranged so that the 4 times a day tide kept the place reasonable clean, of course people down stream did not drink the salt water, just washed in it. Yes, we do get 4 tides at Southampton because of the way the Atlantic tidal stream goes either up The Channel or round the island , down the North Sea and into The Channel from the east. That made us take a walk round the old town yesterday to look at some of these old buildings including the site of the dock where The Mayflower departed. It later went into Plymouth for repairs. There is also a brick wall circa 1925 which has been engraved by numerous Americans while they were waiting to embark prior to D-Day 1944, the wall is now preserved for good.
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