Start of Saturday's Dig - Opening up units on the outside of the church wall.

A few of my students and I, along with some of my archaeologists friends, worked at the Hamline Methodist Church site on Saturday. I was hoping to get a couple of units excavated outside of the east wall before winter shuts down the dig. Our earlier work led me to expect a fairly easy day of digging – a burned layer with shattered glass and other artifacts from the church at about 40 cm below the ground. We found the burned layer just as I expected, but we also found a surprise – a second stone foundation.

Miles, Gao, and Shakira excavating the limestone rubble layer at the Hamline Methodist Church site

After what seemed like weeks of digging sand and gravel fill at the church site, we finally uncovered the remains of the church interior on Thursday. We found a pretty impressive layer of limestone rubble at about 140 cm below the ground surface. I assume this rubble layer is the limestone knocked off the foundation during the demolition of the church after the fire in 1925. Our plan is to finish cleaning the limestone layer, map and photograph it, then see what’s underneath. Presumably we’ll find anything that was left in the church after the fire. It could be interesting.

More photographs below

Hamline Methodist Church - Old and New (Alisha brushing the foundation)

Today was gorgeous – lots of sunshine, beautiful fall colors, and great stratigraphy. My Excavating Hamline History class is continuing to work three sites – the Methodist Church, the Levin Backyard site, and Hamline’s Old Main. All three sites are producing interesting results. In our backyard dig were finding complicated deposits with layers of ash, trash, and sand. We’re at 70 cm below the ground surface with no sign of an end to our finds.

Methodist Church Site - First View of the Wall

I was starting to worry. After digging four units in our trench, we still had not found the east wall of the church. Saturday, with the help of neighborhood volunteers and a girl scout troop, we expanded our trench one meter further east. There was still no sign of the wall by the end of our Saturday dig. As it turned out, though, our last level on Saturday was just a trowel scrape from the top of the wall. My students quickly started uncovering large limestone blocks and chunks of burned wood when we returned to the church site on Tuesday. What a relief. We can expand our excavation inside the church now that we have a wall to guide us.

(More on Saturday’s neighborhood archaeology open dig below)

Gail Nosek, in Hamline’s public relations office, has made a great video on my archaeology class. The video starts with the sound of dirt being screened, perhaps the quintessential noise of archaeology. Hearing that swish of gravel rolling around screen always makes my heart happy. My students are the real stars – explaining the class with such enthusiasm. They made what we’re doing sound meaningful and interesting. The only problem is the video was taken on a beautiful, sunny fall day. Few people will appreciate that we actually spent most of this fall digging in the mud.

Backyard Archaeology at the Levin's site

The wet weather on Wednesday and Thursday continued to challenge us. Instead of returning to our saturated church site, we decided to start our backyard archaeology. The Levin’s have offered us their backyard. They have found a lot of domestic trash while digging their garden plots. So it’s not surprising that we are finding a lot of artifacts. Our research goal is to determine whether the finds are from a pit feature or from a sheet midden. We also want to be able to understand the time period represented by the refuse. How long did people living in the Hamline neighborhood continue to discard trash in their backyards? Does the condition or type of trash change over time?

Jenou and Bee drawing artifacts with Jamie's help (Photo by Shakira Jones).

Thursday started out as a very good day. We spent our first hour digging with the Hancock Elementary students, but then we ended our day in a muddy mess.  The weather was relatively nice while we worked with the Hancock students (and by relatively nice, I mean low 40s and cloudy, but no rain or snow). We went to the church site after the Hancock students left only to find that our trench had a stream running through it. We diverted the water into one unit, so that we could dig in the other three units. The muddy soil was impossible to ‘dry’ screen. Instead we water screened using a hose we found in one of the church gardens. Just about everyone was wet and muddy by the end of the day. Surprisingly my students did not revolt. I even thought I saw a few smiles – although those could have been students plotting their revenge on their professor. I can never tell those two looks apart.

I’ve posted additional photos from Tuesday, October 15th below.

Snowy Church Site - Monday, October 12th

Weather continues to be a challenge for our Hamline excavations. Earlier in October it was rain. Now we have snow. The only thing that gives me some hope is that the ground is not yet frozen. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for tomorrow’s class.

We’ve been having a hard time making any progress on our Hamline fieldwork. Today’s rain might be needed by our region, but it sure made a mess of the digging. We just managed to strip the sod from our trench at the Hamline Methodist Church site and start laying out an excavation square at Old Main before the rain came down by the buckets full. No sprinkle to warn us that our time was short. Just a drenching rain and a mad scramble back to the lab. Bummer.

I’m hoping for a beautiful October and lots of good digging.

Removing the Sod Layer at the Hamline Methodist Church Site.

Update (Thursday PM): On my walk to my car this evening I went by the church and noticed that our dig site is covered with a couple of inches of water.

Bits of Hamline's Beginning

My Excavating Hamline History class started our fieldwork today, digging shovel tests around Hamline’s Old Main building. Old Main, as the name implies, is our school’s oldest remaining structure, but it isn’t the first built on our St. Paul campus. That honor belongs to University Hall – where construction began in 1873 and finished in 1880, just a few short years before fire destroyed this impressive structure. Old Main was rebuilt on the same spot, possibly the same foundation. Our goal with our shovel tests around Old Main was to see if there remains any evidence of the original University Hall – or any evidence of a fire. We found plenty of bricks, slate shingle, window glass, and nails. The bricks were mostly yellow or creme colored. Many of the nails were cut nails. Both the yellow bricks and the cut nails are consistent with a building from the 1870s. I’m intrigued by the possibility that we’ve found pieces of Hamline’s St. Paul beginnings, but we need to expand our investigation here to see if we can’t better identify the context of these finds. We’ll return on Thursday and start excavating a larger area with the hope of finding the 1880 ground surface.

I’ve posted a couple of photographs of today’s fieldwork below. There are also a bunch more photos from all three years of my class on my Flickr page. Check them out if you want to see what we’re doing.