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Apologies, dear readers, for the long break in posts. Today is my first day off in more than a week and its been incredibly intense finishing up Oven Site and then starting - and finishing - the other three sites. Plus, the crew inevitably hits a physical wall in week five as the hotter and more humid  Bermuda days take their toll. I am happy to report that all the students survived their ordeals (and, for some, self-inflicted wounds) and half of them are now safely home. The excavations are not finished - Cave Site and the new Cistern Site at Oven House are still open and active - but Smallpox Bay, Kiln, and the main Oven Site are now filled in - about which more later. The Tragic Tale of the Iron Plate The last week started with our valiant attempt to raise intact the iron plate we discovered at the end of last season in unit N5 E5, which waited patiently for us to remove the four feet of stratigraphy lying atop it in N4 E5. On Monday the final layer of char and rubble related to...

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...

Experiencing/Surviving Seventeenth-Century Day is a rite of passage in the Bermuda field school. Rumours and retellings have blown the day up to epic proportions for new students, especially when told by returnees. My original intent is/was to put us all into more direct contact with the realities and activities of the earliest Bermudian settlers who lived on Smiths Island and built and occupied Oven Site - a blending of experiential history and experimental archaeology - to give greater relevance to our daily excavations hereafter and provoke thoughts about how the artifacts we recover reflect things that we simulated on Seventeenth-Century Day. But I appreciate now that there is a further ethnographic component to it, a leveling of supervisors, veterans, and newbies and a bonding through shared stories, explorations, and common experiences.  This year's group were told horror stories about sleepless nights on concrete floors and toxic fish chowder, and three of the returnees chos...

Ethan and Alice, showing off U of R pride Students wearing this year's official dig t-shirt It's hard to believe how quickly time flies during a field school. Seems like just yesterday everyone was getting off the plane, but we've fused into a well honed team and have made tremendous progress, both educationally and on Oven Site. And we just completed Seventeenth-Century Day, which will get its own blog post a bit later. Since the last installment, We took much of Oven Site down on a plane to the surface of the late 17th-century floor layer. En route, we discerned from among the later quarry rubble a 2-3 course narrow stone wall which had toppled inward - apparently the footing for a wooden sill that supported the frame of the second-period timber frame house. 17th-century floor in foreground, with fallen wall just to the north, looking north This was an important find, since we have not thus far found exterior postholes (as one often finds on 17th-century Chesapeake sites)...