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The wind has let up enough for Mike and I to get out to Smiths Island for a day. We found the tarps had survived the gusts but rain had scoured the sites - a good thing, as it turned out! The sets of postholes in the Oven Site really stood out. It appears that there was two or three building/repair phases, with large oval shallow posts as an early phase (green) and small deep round holes (red and blue) as later refits (color coded below). The yellow posthole on the northern wall might have been cut entirely into bedrock originally, only to be bisected and partially exposed later when the cut of the north wall may have been extended. Most of our short day was spent trying to take the middle unit of the CHB site down to the floor cut, carrying on from where the students left off last week. We started already quite deep and kept going through a layer thick with stone rubble. As we went deeper, we found more slanting stone faces and slot trenches - which strongly suggests that the floor ha...

OK, I know all this wind isn't Debbie's fault - she's not even a tropical depression now and too far away from Bermuda to blame, but it's very frustrating being able to SEE Smiths Island and not get there to get the last couple of days of work done. But 30 kt. winds and whitecaps in the harbour will keep Geoffrey's boat at its mooring. Maybe I can swim out across The Narrows... it's only 50 feet! In the mean time, I've been playing tourist. On Monday, the family and I went to the Bermuda Aquarium and Zoo at Flatts - excellent and much better than I remember it from 15 years back. The Madagascar section is really good and lets you get up close and personal with lemurs like the one above. The flamingoes are nesting in an explosion of pink and noise. On Tuesday we wandered through St. George's, visiting the World Heritage Center and watching the Ducking of the Gossip at King's Square.  My daughter Katie went fishing for the first time ever (with a brigh...

Use Your Mind! Become One with the Features... It's been a busy couple of days here on Smiths Island. With the end of the field school looming on Friday, we've been moving a lot of dirt and trying to get as many questions answered as possible before we have to close up shop. Wednesday was our last full day of excavating. We shifted most of the crew to CHB to try to take the exploratory trench down to the original cut floor west of the slope the Quarin uncovered. The digging got easier after getting through the thick mat of roots in the top 3 inches of the units and we moved through a succession of discrete layers with varied by their degree of small pebble/rubble inclusions. There were surprisingly few artifacts in the upper layers, but about a foot down we found a succession of intriguing artifacts, including tin-glazed earthenwares ("delft"), slipwares, a green glass bead, some unmolded white salt-glazed stoneware, and many fragments of limestone daub - the sort of ...

It is a truism that in the final week of any dig, the archaeology gods start to mess with you - strange features pop up or unusual artifacts appear that throw off your interpretation. I warned the students of this yesterday and within hours odd things began to happen. Wherever I've put Quarin to dig, puzzling features have appeared in her units. On Monday we noticed a linear cut at the top of her square in CHB that lined up with the wall cut visible to the north - seeming to indicate the front of the house, although narrower than we expected. I went off to Oven Site to work on the fill of the oven and map the post holes cut into the floor, expecting Quarin would find a post hole or two to the east of this apparent cellar cut line to confirm we had the front of the house. Instead, she found a quite deliberate slope: With only a day and a half of excavation left, we couldn't start the square immediately to the east which would inform us as to how deep this sloped cut went, but as...

All I wanted for Father's Day was an hour or two digging in the hearth - the perfect way for an archaeologist to spend the day, free from the usual paperwork and photo-taking that accompanies excavation... I got this, but a whole lot more excitement to boot, thanks to the vagaries of Bermuda Weather Service forecasting. The day's forecast at 8am read thus: Today -    Cloudy, rain/showers & risk of thunder,easing late afternoon...  Winds east-northeasterly light to moderate, becoming light and variable in the afternoon...  High near 25°C/77°F. - (MORE ON THIS LATER...) We headed out from Red Barracks (our house-sit) with Mike, Charlotte, and Becca with moderate winds blowing out of the east. En route we passed Rambler  at Ordnance Island and saw her exhausted crew lounging dockside after WINNING THE NEWPORT-BERMUDA RACE! She was in by at least 7:50, which means she shattered the old race record of about 48 hours. The rest of the 160 or so other racers will be...

Saturday dawned much calmer than the day before, so we set out - the usual crew plus three more - Charlotte, Becca, and Zoe. The sites held up remarkably well to a record-heavy rainfall on Friday, but it was clear we needed to shelter the CHB site for the future. While the Oven Site team (Mimi, Mike and Leigh) cleared up and settled in to work, we put up a tarp over CHB as the rest began doing battle with the dense mat of roots that is the Bermudian surface layer. Becca, Charlotte, and Zoe at work. With just a week left, the goal of this trench is to 1) provide a window into the typical stratigraphy in the center of the house and 2) to recover datable artifacts to establish the occupation range of the site. A probe revealed that there is at least two feet of soil atop the original quarried stone floor, so we have a ways to go. At the Oven Site, Leigh cleared out the fill from the strange grotto feature cut into the bedrock outcropping. We puzzled over its function throughout the mornin...