All right, armchair archaeologists, this is the end of our adventure. We’ve made real headway on the UNESCO application process and have left Grand-Pré with more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.

We’ve met some amazing people, had some amazing experiences and will shortly be headed back to university.

Thanks, readers, your participation had made this experience extraordinary. But all good things must come to an end, and we must bid you all adieu. So, with the good professor Dr. Jones to play us out, farewell until we meet again.

So, after three months of trying to subtly re-inforce the principle that archaeology is about material culture, and not – say, a quest for bones, as is commonly believed, I’ve unfortunately got to post today to say that… sometimes, it’s all about bones.

And lately, you guessed it… it’s been all about bones. Having stumbled on an old midden (the archaeological euphemism for garbage heap), we have the bones of all your favourite domesticated animals, proof that the 18th century inhabitants of the region had no use for vegetarianism whatsoever. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, you don’t make history with salad. Or, at least, you don’t make quite as much of an archaeological footprint.

Thanks to the meatatarians at Horton Landing, we’ve collected enough bone to theoretically re-assemble a skeletal herd of cattle, so we’ve been painstakingly cleaning the bone in order to prepare it for faunal analysis.

For instance, Exhibit A, bones that are in the slow process of being cleaned with a dry brush:

Bones waiting to be cleaned.

Bones that have been cleaned.

That’s a lot of bone. But, as these things would have it, those are just the bones that Cate’s cleaned today. There’s way more where that came from!

There's more here.

And some more here.

 

And some more here.

 

In fact, we have sundry boxes of bone strewn throughout the lab, not unlike some bloodthirsty monster would a cave. Basically, if you own a dog, this is his happy place.

And just in case we thought we’d ever run out of bone, we also collected soil samples from Test Trench #2. This soil sample is being dried out so that we can put it through a process called flotation. Flotation is what it sounds like – we add water to the soil sample and after agitating it for a long time, the soil itself will dissolve in the water and the contents of the soil will separate. Some of it will float to the top, becoming what’s called the light fraction, and some will sink to the bottom, as the heavy fraction. The light fraction will give us organic material like charcoal or seeds, while the heavy fraction will perhaps yield more artefacts.

A soil sample spread out on a table in the lab, drying out for flotation.

Needless to say, one doesn’t have to look through this material for very long before coming across plenty more bone:

I hold up a piece of bone and some teeth that were lin the soil sample.

Save us all a bit of work, would you?  Go vegan!

No, it’s not the latest dance craze. It’s just seems that inevitably, despite everyone’s best efforts to avoid it, the last day of the dig is always a hectic one.

We tried to avoid this by digging our butts off on Thursday, even as rain started to thoroughly soak our excavations. Despite our best efforts, the rain thwarted our endeavour to avoid having a crazy and labour intensive last day and we were forced to head home early without having completed our work.

On Friday morning we dug like mad men in an attempt to get home before nightfall. We finished out excavations, made plan maps and drew the profiles of both trench 2 and 3.  Which is easier said than done. That’s almost a full day’s work.

Donna and I map the strata and inclusions found in the profile walls of the excavation.

After this, in an amazingly sweaty whirlwind of soil and shovels, we filled in the pits and called it a day

Minimal plastic is placed in the bottom of the pit in order to create a reference point for any possible future excavators.

Our day finished later than usual, but it was worth it because we drew some pretty interesting conclusions from our excavations. We seem to have found some sort of structural beam that seems to span all three of our trenches. Near this structural feature was a midden filled with all sorts of Planter period glass, ceramics, metal and animal bone. The bone material will be sent for faunal analysis. Here we hope to discover which kinds of animal remains were left in this pit. As such, we hope to discover whether they were wild or domestic animals, and get some insight into the Planter way of life. 

The other materials found in the excavations seem to have been exclusively British, save for one lone piece of Acadian ceramic. Thus, it is possible that our findings are related to Fort Montague, which was an English fort believed to have been located in that area.

We will be sending some buttons and our shovel away for conservation and will be doing further testing on the soil from the midden area. From this we hope to gather some botanical samples as well as any smaller bones for further analysis.

With the dig wrapped up, we’ll be cleaning and bagging all of the artefacts (including a veritable mountain of bone) in the lab for the next little while.

Questions or comments? Leave them below.

-Catherine Lapointe

On Monday and Tuesday morning, Matt and I worked on reconstructing and drawing the various pieces the massive aboiteau we dredged last week. It’s a longer process than it might sound, since the aboiteau itself is over 12 metres long, and our drawings are measured and mapped out on graph paper, accurate to ten centimetre intervals. But, Matt and I are clearly heroes (and incredibly humble!) and managed to get all the drawings save one completed on Monday, and then went back for one more on Tuesday morning.

Matt and I work on mapping the dowels on one of the ends of the dredged aboiteau.

Meanwhile, Barbara, Cate and Donna worked on the 2 x 2 metre pit we’ve put it in at the (presumed) site of Fort Montague, finding loads of fascinating artefacts, including a second coin!

The smiles on their faces are proportional to artefact yield.

One of the very neat pieces, was the nearly complete shovel blade, Rob is shown excavating below:

Following our adventures in drawing, Matt and I continued doing some shovel testing closer to the water, hoping to come across a) earlier material (Where are you, Acadians of Vieux Logis?), and b) possible evidence of a landing site.

The small, shadowy figures seen in the distance are champion shovel testers. Namely, me. And Matt, I suppose.

These objectives were rapidly dashed on the wretched crags of a disappointingly low artefact yield. In three of the pits we found more than ten pieces of ceramic, but the rest of the tests ranged somewhere between 0 and 1 artefacts per hole. We did, however, open up a shovel test which seemed to come down on something structural, so there’s a possibility for the future.

This morning, Wednesday, Katie met up with us and Rob allowed us to take a jaunt down on the marshes, as they GPS’d the second aboiteau we had found. While down there, we took a look at the site of the aboiteau we dredged and realised that there’s still a great amount of work to be done, with timbers coming out of the sides of the canal.

Rob hacks at some of the baked mud that both protects and holds captive more pieces of the dyke structure.

Then, it was back to the site for the rest of the day. Matt and I finished up our shovel testing, and got to open a brand new 1 x 1 adjoining the previous unit that Katie, Cate, Charlene, Donna and I excavated a few weeks ago. We’re hoping to find further evidence of the structure seen in that old unit.

Hard to believe there’s only two days left! It’s absolutely flown by… we’ve done some fun work, but there’s still so much more I’d like to do. At any rate, we have a great crew!

From left to right: Donna, Cate, Barbara, Matt, Rob and moi.

Our excavation of a supposed Planter’s midden continued this week. We did a few shovel tests, which didn’t turn up any extraordinary results. But back at our expansion of the midden itself there were lots of interesting finds. Among them was a 1751 English halfpenny, a rather large piece of a Salt-glaze Stoneware bowl and a small piece of St-Onge. This last find is particularly exciting because until now we haven’t found anything that conclusively proved the existence of Acadians at the site. Though this is definitely not evidence enough to prove their occupation of the site, St-Onge is known as the Acadian calling card. This vibrant green glazed earthenware is generally found in association with Acadian sites. Should we find any more of it, perhaps we will be able to conclusively prove Acadian presence at this site.

On Friday we were plagued by rain. When this happens it is nearly impossible to trowel and screen for artefacts properly. Thus, we spent the time doing a pedestrian survey of the areas surrounding the place where the aboiteau was found earlier this week.

Some of our volunteers had their last days with us this week. As any archaeologist will tell you, bonds are forged quickly in on the dig site. You see, when one digs, one is constantly in close quarters with ones co-workers. When finds are few and far between, it’s only natural to while away the time trading stories and getting to know each other. It’s bittersweet because digs don’t often last more than a few weeks. Nevertheless, in the course of this summer Christina and I have had the privilege to work with many extra-ordinary people. I am sure that she is just as grateful as I to have had the privilege to make their acquaintance.

Just some of the amazing people we've had the privilege to work with over the summer. I'm sure there's still many more to come.

-Cate

 

Tuesday morning brought with it  The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle: Grand-Pré Edition. When we arrived at Grand-Pré, we headed first to the National Historic Site, where the pieces of the aboiteau we salvaged were resting, after we’d washed them yesterday.

Cate and I stand by pieces of the aboiteau which we recovered from the marshes on Monday.

With all of the pieces now clean, dry, and resting up on blocks, we were able to take a measurement of the full length of the aboiteau, and then hazard a few guesses at where each of the pieces went. We discovered that we’ve done quite well, and actually have most of the pieces.

TJ and Matt examine some of the pieces more closely.

After re-assembling the aboiteau, we headed over to our new site of operations, on some private land in the Grand-Pré area. Cate, Matt, Heather, and TJ worked on opening up a 2m by 2m extension of previous work, while Donna and I worked on doing some shovel testing every five metres to the north.

TJ, Heather, Cate and Matt work on the 2 x 2 metre unit.

 

Definitely a higher-yielding area than the Horton Landing historic site, since the crew already has tons of artefacts from the unit, despite still not being very deep into it.

Donna and I had some artefacts from our testing, but the soil is hard-packed, and brutal to get through, so we can’t move along at quite the pace that we maintained at Horton Landing, but we’re also finding a few more artefacts as well.

Today marked the end of our dig at Horton Landing. We arrived on the site with nothing to do but a quick line of 4 test pits. With two new volunteers on hand, we made quick work of it and were done in about the time it would take to enjoy a hot cup of coffee. As has been the trend near the Deportation Cross and the Planter’s Monument, artefact yields were very low. This might seem disappointing to some, but we can learn just as much from a lack of artefacts as we can from an abundance of them.

Having wrapped that up, we quickly moved on to a new task. It seems that some construction work in an agricultural field accidentally uncovered an aboiteau!

These are truly the cornerstone of Acadian construction, in fact, the name Acadian means “les défricheurs d’eau” which loosely translates to the “clearers of water”. (I’m sure there’s a snappier name for it in English, but only the french version comes to mind. I’m going to blame my french upbringing for that one.) An aboiteau is  a sluice gate in a dike which allows water to flow out one end, but prevents it from flowing in the other. Using technology like this, the Acadians were able to turn marshes into extremely fertile agricultural lands. 

This aboiteau is particularly interesting because of its intriguing craftsmanship. Most aboiteaux resemble hollowed out logs, but curiously, this one seems to have been squared off. Why go through so much trouble? This would have been tricky and time consuming considering the tools they had at their disposal back then. Did someone just really want to show off their superior craftsmanship or was this a functional decision. Post any of your ideas below.

We are currently awaiting dendochronology (also known as tree ring dating) results to tell us the age of this intriguing construction. Till then we will try to clean it off and learn what we can from it during the next few days.

-Catherine Lapointe

Friday! Friday’s always been my favourite day of any week, ever since I was three and errantly believed that it was named Fryday after my surname, that it was a short form of Christina Fry Day. I’d like to say that my megalomania has decreased with age.

…I’d like to be able to say that.

This Friday was a particularly fun one, since Charlene, who had been on our previous dig a few weeks ago, stopped by to volunteer, and Katie stopped by to visit, so the whole ensemble was complete. It was like a band reunion, except we got back together only two weeks later, and not say, decades, and we broke up because the permit was over, and not because we couldn’t maintain our friendship in the midst of all the media attention (CBC Radio One) and crazed fans (Shout out to our 50-odd regular daily readership. We do all of this for you. And we dig you. We really do!)

Anyway, while losing half of our flesh and blood to black flies, Donna, Charlene and I dug some more test pits, while Rob went out to a meeting at the National Historic Site. We were far luckier than we’d been the day before:

Hole 1: No artefacts. Pity.

Hole 2: FOUR arfefacts, which is an increase over nothing which actually can’t be quantified mathematically, except to say +4.

Hole 3: FIVE arfefacts. We’d already found more artefacts by Hole Three than we’d found in all of the other 17-odd test pits put together.

Hole 4: 4 ceramics.

Hole 5: 6, 6 artefacts! YES! Nothing too astronomical or life-altering, but this is a number.

After finishing this line, it was nearly lunch time, so rather than start our next line of tests we all went and did some relaxing pedestrian surveying of the beach area to see if we could find anything cool. While out looking about, Matt found a strange green amo box concealed by one of the trees.

Hmmm.

After arming ourselves sufficiently, we opened up the box to find it full of objects from long ago 2007. A geocache! Found without GPS! We didn’t take anything out, but we signed the little book inside. Then, we continued looking around, only to find yet another geocache, this one a bit smaller. Again, we didn’t take anything out, but signed the book, and I left a keychain, which will be in wait there for the most intrepid of geocachers to find.

After lunch, we started a new line of shovel tests, and Donna brought out her radio. We could only get the classic rock station, which is fine by me, since musically, I think I’m not fully aware of anything that was made after 1980. The first song that played on the radio was Eric Clapton’s ‘Cocaine’, which officially made our dig site the grooviest dig site in the Valley, at least.

Rob popped over and said, “Y’know, I don’t like having music playing on my dig site.” I wasn’t sure if he was serious, and I was scared. “Not… not even Eric Clapton?” I asked, in a small voice. But Rob was bopping his head with a vigour that has broken several of the world’s finest bobble heads. “Well, that’s different,” he said, “There’s music… and then there’s music.”

So for the rest of the afternoon, we dug test pits with a skip in our step. Clapton can always get you sticking a shovel in the ground with a grin on your face. It was a perfect Friday.

It was a beautiful day at Horton Landing… but then it’s almost invariably beautiful at Horton Landing. Even on a stormy day, everything is perfectly peaceful. It’s a peculiar thing.

In the morning, Donna and I cleaned up the profiles (the walls of the unit, where the differentiations in soil colour and texture can be most clearly seen) on the one metre squared unit that we used to check the general stratigraphy of the area.

Meanwhile, Rob went to Wolfville and picked up a blowtorch, so upon his return Donna had a pyromaniacal time blasting the roots out of the walls and floor, in order that the stratigraphy would be more visible in photographs. We took photographs of all the profiles,  though the sunny weather actually made this more difficult. Bit of trivia: ask any archaeologist his or her favourite weather, and he or she will likely answer very gently breezy and entirely overcast. The sun casts wretched shadows on the walls and in the unit, making it that much harder to see where and what you’re digging, particularly if you’re looking for a very subtle shift in soil colour.

After the photographs, Donna and I set out drawing the profiles. This may seem vaguely counter intuitive, having just used the modern technology of the photograph to record the same thing, but the drawings will likely be more useful to future researches than the photographs. Lot changes can be a somewhat subjective science at times, and it’s often more useful to know exactly where the excavators believed the shifts to have occurred, than to try and identify them for yourself just by looking at a photo.

Nevertheless, drawing profiles is somewhat time-consuming, since measurements must be taken consistently, and the lines graphed out as accurately as possible. This is easy where the stratigraphy is straightforward and intuitive… and less so when it’s all a mottled and mixed up mess, as soil so often is in the greater Grand-Pre area.

Once the profiles were finished, Donna and I backfilled the unit in record time, and started doing some circular test pits every five metres across the field. The tests offered us fewer artefacts than one might have hoped. In fact, it was a pretty low-riding emotional roller coaster. Observe:

Hole 1: 2 artefacts. Disappointing.

…Or so I thought.

Hole 2: No artefacts.

Hole 3: One solitary piece of green glass. Trying to be thankful for it.

Hole 4: No artefacts.

Hole 5: No artefacts.

Hole 6: No artefacts.

Hole 7: No artefacts.

Hole 8: No artefacts.

The inauspicious Hole 1 turned out to be the most high-yielding test of the day! Still, a lack of artefacts is still a pertinent piece of information, still helps us to construct the human interaction with the landscape, still… well, y’know. But you never realise what a junkie for material culture you are until you find yourself staring at a hole that’s half a metre deep, finding squat, and wishing, praying that someone had littered, lost their keys, spat out their gum on a visit to the site even a year ago, just so there’d be something.

…So I guess what I’m asking you – completely externally from Parks Canada and its subsidiaries – is please, please, litter. For the sake of the archaeologists of the future. Drop stuff anywhere and everywhere. Break everything you own, and scatter it across your lawn, my lawn, your neighbour’s lawn. It’s for posterity, really. You’d be doing your grandchildren a solid.

So we’ve managed to escape the lab’s fluorescent lights in favour of the great outdoors. Yep, we’re on a new dig, with a new crew, on a new site!

Now that we’re not on private land, we can actually tell you where we are. We’ve found our way back to the cross at Horton Landing. We’re digging on the Parks Canada land surrounding the monument in the hopes of finding fresh evidence to add to our UNESCO application. So hopefully our dig here will bring us that much closer to getting the Grand-Pré area certified as a World Heritage site.

Day 1 got off to a productive start. As usual, a gloomy day in Halifax means a bright sunny one out at Horton Landing. Thus, we left the rain soaked city and found nothing but sunshine and beautiful scenery at our site. We started it off oldschool with a metal detector, trying to find the metal pins which placed there last year as points of reference for ground testing.

See, I told you it was beautiful. Donna uses the metal detector to locate a pin as Matt and I scramble to uncover it.

Once we got our bearings, we then laid down a 1mx1m test pit in a place which showed promising results upon the analysis of the afore mentionned tests.

We're literally up to our elbows in history here. Off in the distance is an iron cross, commemorating the Acadian Deportation. To the right is a monument honouring the Planters who thrived in the area after the Diaspora.

Today, Day 2, Donna and Christina worked a little more on the 1×1 while Matt and I shovel-tested the heck out of the rest of the property. We got 4 pits done  as the girls dug deeper. We all found a few artefacts; namely some ceramics, glass and various metal pieces. Arguably one of the most intriguing discoveries of the day was a distinct grey soil colouration among the orangy sterile soil in one of the shovel-test areas. Could this be a feature? Only time will tell. We should know soon enough though, as our director, Rob, plans to have us extend the pit tomorrow.

Crossing my fingers and dying of curiosity,

-Catherine Lapointe