Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
My good buddy Stan once again was a gracious host and invited me and my digging partner Dan to join him in another visit to the huge 1600s dump we’ve been hitting for years. It’s getting harder to find an undisturbed spot, but we went outside the box yesterday by removing a large amount of dead wood from a small area that we figured had never been touched. And as we suspected, it probed out quite nicely and we were soon down to a nice use layer. This spot was quite early as just about every artifact we recovered dated to the 17th century. Our primary mission when digging at this site is to recover monogrammed or dated colonial wine bottle seals as many have been recovered here, and although this large dumping area is normally chock-full of onion bottle glass, today was a different story. Outside of the usual oyster shell and animal bones, the most prevalent find of the day seemed to be clay pipe bowls, and 3 of mine were marked – “IC” for pipemaker James Court (1660-1680), “MB” for Michael Brown (late 1600s), and an unidentified “T”. I recovered about 100 pipe stems as well, and I need to spend some time to see if any will match up with the bowls. We all went home with a nice assortment of pipe bowls with many being of the early, bulbous variety. Many domestically produced reddish-brown stems were recovered too which was a bit unusual. I also unearthed the top to a 1600s bellarmine jug that includes the telltale bearded man image along with an asymmetric buckle and tudor rose button. All in all, it was a very fun and exciting day, one that will be hard to duplicate although we certainly plan to expand on that spot on our next visit. Thanks again Stan - we had a blast as usual!
We had 3 sifters going, and we eventually combined our 3 dig holes into a big "Y" shaped pit.
Here's my take for the day with before and after cleaning pics shown ....
Here's a few nice examples of complete bowls that I recovered.
A close-up of the makers marks that appeared on the bottom of large flat heels.
Nearly all of the pipe stems had huge bore diameters indicative of 17th century manufacture.
A surprise find was this top to a 1600s bellarmine jug with its distinctive bearded man image. Dan recovered what we believe is the bottom of this vessel, but strangely no other shards were found.
A nice asymmetric buckle (missing its central bar) along with a 2-piece button depicting a tudor rose design turned up in my sifter.
And finally, an old friend of mine asked if he could meet me at the dig site so that he could purchase one of my new books. When he got there he wanted me to sign it on top of a sifter which was kinda cool. I asked him if he wanted me to smear a little pit dirt on it for effect, but he humorously declined. That was definitely an unusual first for me.
We had 3 sifters going, and we eventually combined our 3 dig holes into a big "Y" shaped pit.
Here's my take for the day with before and after cleaning pics shown ....
Here's a few nice examples of complete bowls that I recovered.
A close-up of the makers marks that appeared on the bottom of large flat heels.
Nearly all of the pipe stems had huge bore diameters indicative of 17th century manufacture.
A surprise find was this top to a 1600s bellarmine jug with its distinctive bearded man image. Dan recovered what we believe is the bottom of this vessel, but strangely no other shards were found.
A nice asymmetric buckle (missing its central bar) along with a 2-piece button depicting a tudor rose design turned up in my sifter.
And finally, an old friend of mine asked if he could meet me at the dig site so that he could purchase one of my new books. When he got there he wanted me to sign it on top of a sifter which was kinda cool. I asked him if he wanted me to smear a little pit dirt on it for effect, but he humorously declined. That was definitely an unusual first for me.
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Hopefully I'll be able to excavate my first trash pit next year.
