What do Archaeologists Do On Their Days Off...?

...They swim with barracuda!

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Public Tour TOMORROW, Saturday June 20th!

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Yes, you can come out and see our work in person! Please contact the  Bermuda National Trust Tour  link here for tickets and more information! Or look at the  St. George's Foundation  page. It's hard to believe we are approaching our last week in the field! Time flies when you are having fun (and exhausted... and excited ... and excavating...), and we've made tremendous progress on Oven Site. We are now down through the circa 1640-1705 floor layers and the c. 1640 construction layer associated with expanding the original one-room house into two rooms. Within a day or two, we will finally reach the enigmatic iron plate we discovered at the end of last season and begin field conservation on it to attempt to recover it intact (thanks, Kristina, for the Renaissance Wax). The north cut of the earliest phase of Oven Site, with a multi-course stone wall adjoining. The dark gray layer to the south dates to circa 1640, when the house was expanded west. The iron plate is in th...
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Welcome to the Smiths Island Archaeology Project!

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1899 Savage Map Welcome to Michael Jarvis's Smiths Island Archaeology Project Website. Most people today know Bermuda for its pink sand beaches, honeymoon suites, offshore companies, and global business centers, but the island has an even richer history: It is the oldest colony in the British Empire and celebrated its 400 th anniversary in 2012. At only 22 square miles, the island is packed with four centuries of dynamic history – a wonderful laboratory for studying the blending of European, African, and American cultures that characterize the Atlantic World. St. George’s (where we will be based) was founded in 1612 and boasts dozens of houses built in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The sites we hope to find on Smiths Island are even older, dating to 1610. Historical archaeology on land in Bermuda is a mere two decades old; most previous excavations have focused on fortifications, churches, and eighteenth-century domestic sites, but our investigations seek to shed light on the li...
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An Army of One

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Or at least a field team of one - For the past few days I've been doing solo digging at Smiths Island to finish up some of the remaining features that appeared in the last days of the field school and also to excavate the hearth and oven. My family flew back stateside on Sunday, so it's just me and the dirt of Smiths Island! It's both peaceful and a bit lonely digging at Oven Site on my own - tranquil and quiet enough to hint at how Bermuda would have been 300 years ago, but only a few weeks ago the same squares  had happy bantering students and Mike keeping things sane - so their absence haunts the site. But the digging has been great: The mysterious feature cut into the east side of the hearth turns out to be a second, smaller oven. It was somewhat surreal excavating by flashlight sideways. The most interesting artifact turned out to be the remains of a shoe - an intact wooden heel with a reinforcing iron heel "U" (like a tiny horseshoe) and part of the leather ...
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