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Group Portrait at Devonshire Redoubt, Castle Island We are now hitting the mid-season mark of this year's field school and have been frantically busy this past week, both moving a lot of dirt and immersing ourselves in Bermuda's past and present. Last week, a general election shifted control of Bermuda's government from one party to another in an entirely civil manner. The next day it was business as usual at the Bermuda Archives, where the students got to look at manuscript records dating to 1616, 17th-century maps showing houses on Smiths Island, and the 1706 inventory of Captain Boaz Sharp, which documents Oven Site. And Friday, we got a spur-of-the-moment tour of the Spirit of Bermuda as she prepared for a voyage to Halifax - and then got to see her sail off Saturday morning! Captain Phoopa Anderson graciously took us out to Castle Harbour as a birthday treat for me on his new glass-bottom boat Skinny Dipper . We got to see some of the oldest standing fortifications in...

Hello all our Bermuda friends! With the election over, you can turn your attention to the cool work we are doing out at Smiths Island. Come hear about our five seasons of investigations and discoveries TOMORROW at 7pm at the World Heritage Center in St. George's, and then come to Smiths Island yourself and see the sites this SATURDAY at 2pm. See below for more details and RSVP information.  Also, we are still signing up volunteers, so if you are over 15 years of age and willing to put in a few days learning about Bermuda history and doing archaeology first-hand, shoot me an email and we will sign you up.

The 2017 Smiths Island Field Crew (L to R): Xander, Sean, Katrina, Leigh, Fengyi, Karemy, Me, Ewan, and Ryan,  with the infamous feature-attracting yellow water tank from 2010 The dig has started!  We are now all here in Bermuda (no thanks to JetBlue and JFK runway-crossing sea turtles), comfortably installed at our summer quarters in St. George's Preparatory School (thanks Garth, Mary, Unray, Kelly, and camp kids!), well fed (thanks, Somers Market!), well provisioned (thanks Cathie!), outfitted with our boat (thanks Geoffrey!) and have just finished our first full day of work out on Smiths Island. It is pretty stunning how fully nature reclaims a site in just two years' time: July 2015 July 2017  But our lean and fearless crew were up for the task of taking back Oven Site and getting it prepped for picking up where we left off in 2015, ready to get to the bottom of the newly discovered water cistern lying some distance from the main footprint of Oven Site and locating an...