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Total news: 4
Last news: January 31, 2008 06:00:00

Regular updates of the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project. The Project is sponsored by the Archeological Society of Maryland, the Society for the Restoration of Port Tobacco, the Southern Maryland Heritage Area Consortium, Preservation Maryland, and Pres

Total news: 28
Last news: January 1, 1970 00:00:00

In 1727, the General Assembly of Maryland passed an act for the purchase of land and construction of a courthouse and prison on the east side of the Port Tobacco Creek in what was called Chandlers Town. I have transcribed the local proceedings that detail what happened and when and offer the significant portions below. Ive made only a few changes, modernizing spellings to make the text more intelligible. At the end of the selection I have listed a few pieces of information that I find... - [Read more]

Tom, responding to yesterdays posting, asked about the sources that I use in identifying projectile points. Im happy to answer that question, but first I want to reiterate that classifying projectile points in Maryland is very difficult because many of the point types have been identified elsewhere in the Eastern United States. Brewerton points, for example, were first described by the late William Ritchie in upstate New York and archaeologists and collectors have identified them from Maine... - [Read more]

Pete tells me that we will complete artifact washing this Tuesday at the Crownsville lab. We will then start labeling artifacts and, of course, cataloguing will continue. Until we get all of the material catalogued and the maps and profiles drafted, analysis can proceed only fitfully. In the meantime, however, the team is beginning to put some of what we have learned to use and we are developing approaches for sharing what we will be learning once those analyses are complete.

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I stopped by the Crownsville lab yesterday afternoon where Pete, Maxine, and Steve were working. Maxine was washing several large (more than one-inch square) aboriginal pottery sherds with well-placed, sharp-edged cord marks. The remarkable state of preservation suggests that they were not subjected to motorized plows, and possibly not even by plows drawn by draft animals. This bit of evidence further confirms that we have an intact aboriginal component dating to the Late Woodland period. How... - [Read more]

Heres a photograph illustrating most of the projectile points recovered from the South Field, just above Warehouse Point, along with a list of identifiers. Remember that the important thing here is that we know precisely where these objects come from--within a few inches--and, therefore can use them to date concentrations of prehistoric artifacts that are not otherwise datable. Most of the artifacts pictured date to the Late Archaic/Transitional period, a time when aboriginal peoples in the... - [Read more]

In between mouthfuls of baba ganoush and tortilla chips (a boys got to eat) and with Carole King singing in the background Ive been conceptualizing and designing a traveling exhibit. To illustrate what the PTAP team has found at Port Tobacco, I thought that I would plot the historic sites that we have found relative to the river and the town boundaries. The graphic below is the result.




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One of the events that I attended at the SAA conference this week was a roundtable luncheon on sharing archaeology on the web. Our small group discussed what we were each doing, and planning to do, to help bring our projects to the public. Our moderator was Dr. Steve Black, editor of the Texas Beyond History website. One of the topics that we spent a lot of time discussing was the use of video on websites, something the Port Tobacco... - [Read more]

The history boys (Pete, Scott, and me) completed the survey of the fields south of Port Tobacco this afternoon. It was a bit of a trying day, the winds not yet having picked up and the deer flies deciding it was a good day to get out and reproduce. Ah, spring.

I apologize for not getting a posting out yesterday. I returned late from meetings and site visits in the northern part of the state. It wasnt all fun.

I stopped in Glen Arm, Baltimore County, to meet with the pastors of a small African Methodist Episcopal church. They were concerned about the possibility of human burials in an area into which they hope to expand their existing church. While we were looking over the area and discussing potential problems, they noted that just a... - [Read more]

Ive been working with Carol and Paula on reconstructing Port Tobaccos town plan from deed descriptions. It is a difficult job because most of the constituent lots were consolidated in the 20th century and many of the lots from the 1720s onwards were not described in detail. We have had to take an unorthodox approach. Usually a title searcher starts with the current owner and works back using references in each deed to preceding deeds. Weve had to pursue the names of individuals we know lived... - [Read more]

At this point we have no drawings or photographs of the school house built for African American children on the lot that the trustees acquired from William and Ann Matthews. In fact, we do not even know where the school was located. All we have to go on is the description in the original 1868 deed, to wit (Ive modernized some spelling and punctuation):

This Deed Made the Eleventh day of December in the year Eighteen hundred and Sixty Eight by Maj. William B.... - [Read more]