Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
My good buddy Dan and I hooked up Saturday for another day of pit digging at a colonial site we've hit a number of times over the last few months. It was going to be a very hot day (near 90F), and the pit was in full sun and sheltered from any prevailing breezes by some nearby trees, so we loaded up on Gatorade and snacks and met at our usual carpool spot earlier than usual. As soon as I got out of my truck I happened to glance down and eyeballed a gorgeous ring in the parking lot. I took that as a good omen, and we then made the 30 min drive to the site. We opened up a new trench right where we left off last time, and continued to hit the use layer, although it was starting to fade out. As with previous digs here, we dug some interesting iron artifacts including a large knife blade, a gouge, and a large key. Dan also eyeballed a real nice arrowhead in the bottom of the pit, and we wondered how it could have gotten there. We also dug an assortment of period pottery and glass, and after adding those pieces to our other 3 digs at this site we may be able to do at least some partial reconstructions. After about 5 hours in the pit we realized we had reached the edges on all sides. We then decided to dig a few more test holes around the periphery of the entire pit, but all were devoid of a use layer. We finished up the day by surface hunting in a nearby field that had produced multiple colonial silver on previous hunts, but we could only scrounge out a few buttons. We've probably finished digging at this site for now, and will move on to new ground next time out.
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awesome finds!! Years back my dad who is a old time digger found a big colonial trash pit here in Stafford, down by the Potomac Creek, near Crow's Nest (Crow's Nest is a 2,000 acre forest where Pocahontas was born in Stafford) we found virgin oyster shells - they were really huge the shells were like the size of a football, back when the water was still virgin basically... we found a couple pieces of oyster where holes were punched out to make buttons(examples of those are in those colonial reference books), i still remember digging it out - it was more stuff you find in a civil war trash pit and to this day i have not seen a bigger colonial trash pit then what he found.. I wish i could find a good colonial dump site, i sometimes stumble upon colonial period cellar holes but typically not much if anything is in them and finding a *good* colonial trash dump is hard most of the ones i dig out in the Northern Neck are not much of anything.. There are tons of goood colonial trash pits in the city of Fredericksburg but again hard to get permission to dig there..
