Posts

Sadness and Woe for Summer 2018

Image
I am sorry to have to report that there will be no Smiths Island Archaeology field school this summer. This is largely due to our inability to secure affordable accommodations in or near St. George's to house the staff and students, despite the multiple valiant efforts all spring of various friends of the SIAP.  Instead, I will be shifting my energies across the pond to our other UR field school based at Cape Coast in Ghana, where I'll be lecturing on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Portuguese, Dutch, and British activities on the Gold Coast, as well as teaching and supervising laser scanning, photogrammetry and ethnographic research in and around Elmina Castle along with University of Ghana faculty. I won't be entirely alone though - Ewan from the 2017 Bermuda dig will be taking up this new digital archaeology work as well. We hope next year to reposition the field school back to July and early August, which will make participation available to UK students as well as to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

2018 Field School and a video from the vault

Hard to believe, but we are just five months from the start of the 2018 field school! If you are interested in participating, click on the new Field School tab above for information and how to apply. I will be spending the spring at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, working on making an interactive GIS map of Richard Norwood's 1663 survey of Bermuda, and if all goes well, a walkable 3D version of the island in 1663 in Unity. In doing housekeeping among my many old hard drives, I came upon a video we shot on the last day of the 2010 reconnaissance, showing the very first unit we excavated, and our three-person field crew!  "From small acorns mighty oaks grow..." (Benjamin Franklin)
Post a Comment
Read more

Guest Blogger Karemy Valdez - “What am I doing here, and who do these people think they are?"

Image
‘What am I doing here, and who do these people think they are?’: Reflections on my time in Bermuda and my coming-of-age as a historical archaeologist It’s orientation week for incoming graduate students at Yale University. As an event organizer and facilitator this year, I’m getting to mingle with a lot of eager, bright-eyed scientists, doctors-to-be, and library fiends. I love meeting people, but I dread the moment I hear, “So, what do you do?” directed at me. My academic existentialism kicks in and the only answer I can muster is usually somewhere along the lines of, “Well… I’m a professional, certified, 100% free range ancient dumpster diver.” That usually gets a bit of a laugh and a comment about how dinosaurs are really cool and Indiana Jones must be my idol. But, all jokes aside—really, what do archaeologists do? I set out to find the answer to this question five years ago, during my first trip to an archaeological site with a professor from UC San Diego. Out in the Peruvian dese...
Post a Comment
Read more

Baby Teeth and the Elusive Manor House: The 2017 Season in a Nutshell

Image
Apologies, dear readers, for the long gap in posts. Digging in Bermuda in August is brutal, we've found, and exhausting and the last weeks of the dig were a frantic crush of activity. Work hard, play hard and all that. When the typical day is a high of 86 and a low of 82 and high humidity, it's hard to muster the energy to regularly blog! The students were troopers, though, and pushed through the whole season with no heat stroke casualties and good morale through the end. We have now completed our 2017 field work and I can report that at Oven Site  we  excavated 54 contexts in two areas. Our initial exploratory trench 35 feet north northeast of the cistern straddling two courses of a dry Bermuda stone wall ( Oven Site B)  identified apparent footing of a now-lost wooden structure dating to the late 19 th or early 20 th century (right).  Most of the season’s focus was on the Cistern , which was stratigraphically connected to the rest of Oven Site through a clearing ...
Post a Comment
Read more