Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
By the time I got back home from Friday’s outing with Joey, cleaned up, and ate dinner, it was almost time to hit the sack. Then I had to get up early on Sat so I could get ready for the 90 min drive up north to meet up with my good buddy Stan and dig at the huge trash pit at the c1650 site we’ve hit many times before. But there was some fairly heavy rain getting ready to move through the area, and we thought we might have to cancel. We decided to wait another hour to see how things were shaping up, and based on the radar trends we decided to take a chance. It was a good decision as by the time I got up his way there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We both went straight to the 2 spots we had dug at last time (about 3 months ago), and started expanding from there. My pit ended up being loaded with brick and oyster shells as is usually the case, but was almost devoid of glass, pottery and pipe stems. That was a big disappointment as our main purpose at this site has become recovering early black glass bottle seals or whole clay pipe bowls. I ended up digging a huge and deep hole as the use layer continued down to the 5 ft level, but it just didn’t look like it was going to be my day. In the meantime Stan, who was using his new hinged sifter for easier dumping, was steadily pulling some nice stuff from his pit including a number of brass and lead items. He also found 2 bottle seals including this awesome one with a dragon. Not sure if this was a family crest or possibly a makers mark, and we’re researching it now. After that find he was basically leaving me in the dust and I thought I was going home disappointed. Then when I first started sifting I noticed a piece of black glass on the edge of the hole that apparently didn’t make it in when I dumped the sifter. I picked it up, turned it over, and was shocked that it was a seal. Not sure how I missed that one. Then later after I was done with sifting and was raking the remaining loose dirt back into the hole I spotted another interesting piece of glass and got lucky again with my 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] seal. That made my day even though I'd made little in the way of other recoveries from the pit. About the only other worthwhile finds were a bunch of 1600s delftware tile pieces similar to the ones I dug during the last dig here. I’m sure I can reconstruct at least a couple whole ones from all the large shards. As usual we had a ball, and hope we can squeeze in one more dig there before the warm weather hits.
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