Dig Blog: Cleaning Up
by National Trust for Historic Preservation on October 26th, 2009Editor’s Note: Last week, Senior Communications Associate Dwight Young was on an archaeological dig at Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site. He sent daily dispatches about the experience, the last of which is below, from his work on Friday.
Written by Dwight Young
Every volunteer spends one day working in the Archaeology Lab. Today it was my turn.
I spent the morning cleaning artifacts, so I got a firsthand look at what becomes of all the stuff that comes out of the ground. Arranged on the lab table in front of me were: (1) A small, carefully-labeled paper bag containing several smaller, carefully-labeled plastic bags containing several dirt-crusted artifacts; (2) a little pan of water; (3) several toothbrushes; (4) a vicious-looking wire brush; and (5) a screen-bottomed drying rack. You can guess what my job was: take a plastic bag out of the paper bag, take an artifact out of the plastic bag, put the artifact in the pan of water, scrub it with the toothbrush, put it in the drying rack. Lather, rinse, repeat – again and again. The process made for great daydreaming, and there was a real sense of satisfaction when I cleaned a piece of ceramic and uncovered a pretty pattern or interesting glaze.
The only variation from this routine came when the artifact was a nail – in which case I did not put it in the water and I did give it a thorough scrubbing with the wire brush. This effort appeared to accomplish nothing – the scrubbed nails looked exactly like the un-scrubbed ones – and I was feeling frustrated until I recognized a distinctively bent nail as one that I had pulled out of the dirt with my very own personal hands a couple of days earlier. That was MY NAIL, and I tell you, I handled it as tenderly as if it had been an ugly, rusty newborn baby.
Spent most of the afternoon water-screening, which is pretty much what it sounds like: You take a bag of artifacts and clay and bricks and everything else, dump the whole mess into a screen, and blast it with a hose to wash all the mud away. Again, it was nice to see dirty artifacts come clean – but it would’ve been nicer if I hadn’t wound up soaked from neck to knees.
I have to say something about what a wonderful place Montpelier is. There’s a depth and diversity of history here that you don’t find just everywhere – and it goes beyond Madisons and duPonts. Yesterday after work, one of the archaeologists took us to a part of the property I’d never seen before: a small, simple cabin that had been the home of a family named Gilmore at the end of the 19th century. George Gilmore spent much of his life as a Madison slave, and after Emancipation, he bought a bit of land on the Montpelier property and built this little cabin for himself and his family. Over the years the cabin slumped into near-ruin, but eventually it was slated for restoration – and when the Montpelier Foundation started doing archaeology on the site, one of George Gilmore’s descendants joined the dig. And that story moves me so much that I can’t say anything else about it.
Dwight Young joined the staff of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1977. He currently serves as Senior Communications Associate and writes the regular Back Page feature in Preservation magazine.
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