By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2006; C06
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.
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.
"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!"