Under the Sun

Nearly 90 degrees today (29 C) in Delaware, under a bright sun. This makes keeping the site from drying out the top priority. This is a good shot showing how we work on one part of a pit feature while still keeping the rest covered.

One of our pits half excavated, and fully exposed for the photo.

Close up of the array of mysterious iron objects in the pits. I think the item at lower right may be the iron tip to a wooden shovel, but I don't have a clue about the rest.

A small pit after excavation.

Sorting some of the artifacts from that pit. Notice the several different teacup rims, of Pearlware and Chinese porcelain. One of the few clear class patterns in the artifacts from rural America of this period is that better off people had matching sets of dishes, while poor people had mismatched stuff, likely bought used one piece at a time. But even if their teacups were chipped and mismatched, they still had teacups, and this was the period when tea was still "taken" in a rather formal way. That habit spread to the backwoods of British North America by 1760, and there were few cabins remote or so rude that you don't find teacups in their trash.