It's a Dirty Job, But They Dig It

Visitors Help to Unearth Chunks of History

Shannon Oster, an archaeology student from Marquette University working at Historic St. Mary's City this summer, loosens dirt during Tidewater Archaeology Weekend. (Photos By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

Two Boy Scouts jumped onto hay bales next to Brian Eckerle at an archaeological dig in Southern Maryland yesterday and grabbed fistfuls of soil.

"Hey," one said, frowning. "This is just dirt."

Brian, who is 7 and nicknamed B2, held up a clod. "This one is charcoal," he said; it was a little chunk left from some long-ago fire.

And he hoped to find a mummy.

B2 had dirt on his face, his arms, his T-shirt. So did everyone else yesterday at Historic St. Mary's City, an outdoor living history museum, where dirt ran down faces in tracks of sweat, formed dark lines under fingernails and rose in clouds of dust from wheelbarrow loads.

During Tidewater Archaeology Weekend, held yesterday and today, hundreds of people will search through piles of dirt, square by square, looking for artifacts, a sense of history, an answer to a mystery -- or just a sense of serendipity.

Things get lost, forgotten, buried, overlooked. But not here, not this weekend.

Most people miss an awful lot, said Linda Howe and her mother, Pauline Garone. Over the years, they have found fossils, animal teeth and ancient tools. "Once you start finding things," Garone said, "you see things."

Tim Riordan, an archaeologist at St. Mary's City "since they invented dirt," said that nine times out of 10, it's just a bottle cap, and then -- well, you never know.

Yesterday, students shoveled dirt out of a grid marked with twine -- a mysterious area on the site, a place where some kind of 17th-century building once stood -- and dumped it into wooden trays. Visitors picked through the dirt for bits of brick, glass, nails, pottery, pipes -- anything that might help researchers understand what life was like hundreds of years ago.

When Brian and Susan Eckerle, B2's parents, took him to Alaska on vacation recently, they happened upon an excavation. "They were digging up things from the gold-rush times there," Brian Eckerle said. "That really caught his attention."

And they had been to Jamestown. Yesterday, they came from their home in Pomfret to St. Mary's to dig.