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It's a Dirty Job, But They Dig It
Susan Eckerle held up a little brown something. "Rock?" she asked Laura Gilpin, a senior at St. Mary's College of Maryland doing field work this summer.
"Rock," Gilpin said.
  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) |
"Onion, onion, onion, onion," Susan Eckerle said, sifting through the bulbous grass roots. "Rock."
B2 offered another one up. "You found a lithic!" Gilpin said, a chip of quartz splintered off when someone made a tool, long ago. He looked more closely.
"Anything we find is really important to tell us about the site," Gilpin said. "We'll take anything we can get!"
She showed him a piece of a bottle, dark green glinting through the brown dust, and told him to hold it toward the sun to see that it was glass.
Gilpin and B2 shook out the last of the dirt, one at each end of the tray, pushing it back and forth on a metal track. "Yaaaah!" B2 said, laughing as it clattered and sent brown puffs flying.
Another student wiped her face against her tank top, then dumped another bucket of soil into the tray.
Brian Eckerle looked at the big chunks and said to his son, "There might be a dinosaur skull in one of those."
No dinosaur skulls have ever been found at St. Mary's City. But there have been significant discoveries in the nearly 20 years that the public has, uh, dug in. Last year someone found a piece of an elegant dragon-stem wineglass -- so intricate and delicate, research director Henry Miller said, that it was hard to imagine how it survived a trip across the ocean to the colonies long ago. One year, someone found a religious medal.
Each item is a clue to what was once the state capital, which bustled with farms, a chapel, the first Maryland state house, a printing house and one of the colonies' first coffeehouses (where coffee was much less popular than stronger brews).
Letting visitors help gives them a chance to learn about archaeology firsthand, Riordan said. They can climb onto a reconstructed 17th-century ship, wander through an Indian village and imagine people cutting pelts, roasting oysters and rolling hogsheads of tobacco to the river.
Plus: "This is a way to get a lot of dirt moved," Riordan said.
Most of the buildings fit into regular boundaries, but the area that people are working on this weekend is just a little chunk of land that researchers can't quite figure out, Miller said. "It's like it was overlooked or something."
Gilpin is hoping it is the house of Garrett Van Sweringen, the town leader and entrepreneur of St. Mary's City in the 17th century. But Riordan said it is more likely to be servants' quarters or some other type of workaday structure. Visitors yesterday found old nails, chunks of pottery glazed black and a musket ball as they sifted through buckets.
A girl stepped onto a hay bale next to B2. "You finding anything here except for roots?" she asked.
He looked up from the clod he was grating. "Dirt!"
