Total news: 34
Last news: March 11, 2008 14:08:00

Total news: 54
Last news: January 1, 1970 00:00:00

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]

Yesterday Pete wrote about our traveling exhibit which will debut at the Charles County fair next month. It will include artifacts, maps illustrating the distribution of those artifacts, and a variety of historical photographs and maps. The map below shows the locations of prehistoric sites that we identified and mapped.

We are using... - [Read more]

The the ASM Field session is over and its nice to look back at some of the shots of the crew and volunteers. I have some pretty neat pictures on my camera and I know that Pete and April have many as well. I just hope Pete doesnt post the pictures of me threatening our intern Steve as well as Steve Israel. Below are a few shots for your enjoyment:

I decided to wait until tomorrow to post the second installment of Carols piece on James Swann. In its stead Im starting a series of Sunday blogs concerning the churches, cemeteries, and other religious matters in and around Port Tobacco. We can start with an oath of fealty.

Oaths of fealty in Maryland have been around since the founding of the colony. Early on they seemed to have had more to do with acknowledging Lord Baltimores claim to Maryland than anything else. (Virginians... - [Read more]

I was in the library of the Maryland Historical Trust today perusing archaeological reports for Charles County. Sadly, there arent as many as there are for other counties like Prince Georges and Anne Arundel (both review all development projects for possibly adverse effects on archaeological sites). But there are a few goods ones and, as technical reports, the contents go largely unnoticed by the community: there are likely to be fewer than a dozen copies in existence and there are few or no... - [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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Pete has been pulling some artifacts from the collection for display in our new traveling exhibit. From Unit 7, Stratum 3, the provenience from which we recovered a number of pieces of Potomac Creek pottery, comes this triangular point made from a quartzite decortication flake (a flake that retains some of the water-worn rind of the pebble).

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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]

Last week Pete finished mapping all of the artifacts that we recovered in the field immediately north of Warehouse Landing Point (see below). As we noted in previous postings, this field yielded two historic sites, both pre-Revolutionary War and probably pre-Port Tobacco (late 17th/early 18th centuries; Chandlers Town). Those two sites are encircled in red towards the bottom of the map.





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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.

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