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UAB Archaeology Field School

Eager to search for additional evidence of the kitchen at the Slave Quarters at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park, field school participants line up to start digging.  The crew split its time between the Quarters at Tannehill and the Gorgas Home at Brierfield Ironworks Historical State Parks, unearthing important new evidence about both sites.  The new units at the Quarters yielded fragments of additional iron cooking vessels and large folk pottery storage vessels which support the hypothesis that a kitchen once stood here. 

Ceramic tobacco pipe.

One of the more interesting artifacts found during the dig was this well preserved smoking pipe that doubtless provided its slave owner moments of pleasure during the arduous wartime years while the occupants of the Quarters made pig iron for the Confederacy.

Seventeen volunteers arrived ready to dig!

So many volunteers arrived that we were able to finish the Fork Units around the trash pile and move on to the units to the southwest where we suspect we will find evidence of a structure.

A final animal bone fragment from the trash pile.

Dr. Sharyn Jones, UAB Anthropologist, removes a final, large bone fragment from the trash pile. Over seven hundred pieces of animal bone were recovered from around the fireplace at House 1 and the trash pile in the Fork Units. Catherine Wright, a graduate student working with Dr. Jones and recipient of the Garnet M. Garvin Internship in Historical Archaeology next semester, will do a study of this important collection.

An abundance of iron cookware fragments.

Part of the handle, one leg and three fragments from the lid of a Dutch Oven found in a single 1-meter square.  Two other units contained multiple pieces of iron pots while other units yielded single fragments.  This seems like a high concentration of ironware that may indicate a kitchen.

The site had visitors much earlier in history.

Two stone arrow tips and a piece of chert, not native to the area and showing signs of having been modified by humans, indicate that this area, which may have been a kitchen during the Civil War, may also have served as a small hunting camp during prehistoric times.

Heading home.

A light rain brought an end to a very productive day. The crew passes the blast furnaces after returning from the dig along the same trail that slave ironworkers traveled daily between 1858 and 1865.

The Volunteer Dig Team Arrives for Day 1

we removed the plastic covering the “Fork” Units since June and resumed digging down to sterile subsoil, this is going to be a good crew

We suspect there may have been a kitchen and dinning hall somewhere in or near the Slave Quarters at Tannehill.  We plan to test this new hypothesis because this summer we discovered that the Quarters was a more diverse community than originally thought.  Last year, we discovered that House 1 at the southwest end of the Quarters was probably occupied by a family.  This year we discovered that House 2, at the northeast end of the Quarters, may well have been occupied by unmarried male slaves.  Seasonal labor gangs, made up mostly of males, are a documented feature of antebellum iron making operations in the South so it is no real surprise that there may have been a bachelor community in the Quarters at Tannehill.

If so, how and where were these men fed, and who did the cooking?

the “Fork” and “Rock” Units where a trash pile and fragments of iron cooking vessels were found.

There are many possible locations near the blast furnaces and the Quarters where a kitchen and dining hall may have been located, but the area just south of House 1 is an interesting possibility. It yielded numerous bone fragments from a trash pile as well as pieces of what appear to be several different iron cooking vessels. We will be looking for additional evidence of food preparation and consumption along with evidence that a structure once stood here.  If we find a structure, along with an absence of those types of artifacts that might indicate it was a dwelling rather than a more public place, then we might have a dining hall and kitchen.

large piece of a lid to an iron cooking pot found in “Rock” Units

polycrome painted whiteware found in trash pile

Introduction

This fall, winter and spring we will conduct a series of weekend volunteer digs at the Slave Quarters Site at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park. We have a list of enthusiastic volunteers and should be able to accomplish a great deal.  Not everyone will be able to attend every dig weekend. If you can just make one, we will be happy to see you! If you haven’t signed up to volunteer but want to, email Dr. Bergstresser at jackbergstresser@aol.com. We will send out an email notice to all our volunteers at least a week before each dig weekend.

If you have no archaeology experience, don’t worry! If you don’t mind hard work and getting dirty, we’ll teach you how to dig and keep up with the paperwork. Most of the units we will be excavating are very simple with no complicated stratigraphy or subtle features.  They will provide a great learning experience.  For units with features or other complications, we have more experienced diggers to do the job. The more weekends you can attend, the more you can learn. By next spring you could become a first class digro, a real field animal.

Work will start each morning at 9:00 and run until we get ready to call it a day. If you need to leave early, don’t worry.  We will assemble at the Museum at the Park and go to the site as a group.  Once you learn your way around, you can show up at the dig site on your own.

We have all the tools and equipment that will be needed.  You need to bring gloves, bug spray,  something to kneel on, sturdy clothes, and lunch. We’ll have water, drinks and snacks.

If you don’t want to bring a lunch, we can always send out a runner to pick up some burgers from Top Dawg, the best restaurant  in Green Pond, Alabama, not far from the park.

Map to the Park

Plan of Attack for the Volunteer Dig

We will be doing most of our digging near House 1 in the vicinity of a trash pile that we discovered this  summer.  We named the units in this area the Fork Units after Crew Chief Jessica Brown discovered a fork and a small mid-19th century ceramic fragment eroding out of a small patch of dark stained soil that had been exposed by recent rains. One of the exciting finds from these units was a shell casing from a 52 caliber Spencer repeating rifle like those carried by the Union cavalry raiders who freed the Tannehill slaves when they swept through the ironworks on 31 March 1865.  There are a few photos of our work in these units in an earlier blog post.

Two facts make me want to return to this area and complete the units that we did not finish during the summer.  First, we recovered numerous animal bone fragments from the suspected trash pile.  Secondly, we  recovered what I would consider to be a relatively large number of cast iron cookware fragments in units just to the southwest of the Fork Units.

House 1 and the nearby Fork Units.

The most notable of these cast iron cookware fragments was a large piece of a pot lid as shown below.

There are many potential explanations for the large counts of bone fragments and cast iron cookware pieces but one that interests me is the possibility that there was a kitchen nearby.  Our findings at House 2, at the other end of the Quarters, suggest that it was occupied by single males. House 1 on the other hand was probably occupied by a family with a woman present. Is it possible that this woman was a cook for the single males? And, did these men take their meals in a dinning hall and kitchen that was located near her home?

We may never be able to answer these two questions but its worth a try. I look forward to meeting everyone.  Keep an eye out for emails about dig dates.

Dr Hick.

Crew Chief Jessica Brown found a fork, ceramics fragments and dark soil stain a few meters downslope from House One. Her finds suggested the presence of a feature so we opened a series of 1-meter squares we called the Fork Units. What we discovered in these units adds a new dimension to our understanding of probable events around the Quarters during its last days.

Fork Units. We opened nine and one half units over the feature. Hood is opening one.

Bird doggin the screen. Crew members carefully screened the soil from the units, alert for new discoveries in each bucket load.  The soil was rich with artifacts. Ceramics fragments, bone, personal apparel and other items were numerous.

Diligence rewarded. Jessica discovers a pink enamel button.

The real surprise! Keenan Holmes found a spent shell casing from a 52-caliber Spencer repeating rifle. These were devastating weapons during their day because they could fire seven rounds without reloading. In addition, a rifleman could carry a cannister loaded with 10 more seven-round, spring loaded tube magazines.  The only troops who carried Spencers at Tannehill were the Union Calvary raiders who swept through the Iron Works on 31 March 1865. Does this mean that the Yankees were actually in the Quarters that day? Why did they fire a weapon? We have another exciting clue to add to our growing body of information.

We hoped to find differences between this year’s house and the one we studied last year. Our hopes were answered.  We learned a lot. No family lived in this house. It may have been a log cabin instead of a frame house. It burned, but at a different time than the house we studied last year. These and other findings are beginning to give us a much better understanding of the lives of the slaves who lived in the Quarters during it’s brief life span between 1858 and the spring  of 1865.

The field crew from the Alabama Museum of Natural History’s 30th Summer Field Expedition worked hard in the summer heat.

As usual, everything dug from the 1-meter square excavation units was sifted through 1/4-inch screen.

Wizardess of the laser…..

Where to dig next? Since the excavation units were so shallow, never exceeding much more than 10 centimeters, they could usually be finished within one day.  The survey team worked constantly to keep new units staked out and ready.  Here co-crew chief Jes Brown and Dr. Bergstresser decide where to put the next group of squares. Jes was quick and accurate on the total station. She made the complex task of precisely shooting in the corners of each square look easy.

Both houses burned, but at different times. What does this mean? A yellowish brown material holds the answer to this question. It is clay that was dug nearby and used as chinking to hold together the stone for the fireplace and chimney. As soon as the structures were abandoned the relatively soft clay began to “melt” and the chimney collapsed into a jumble of clay and rock. If the structure burned before the chimney “melted,” the clay would bury the ash and charcoal.  If the structure burned after the chimney had “melted,” the ash and charcoal would be on top, covering the clay. We were surprised by what we found.

an excavation unit at House 1

House 1 burned first and then the chimney melted. The image above shows the clay forming a cap over the burn layer.  In this unit most of the clay cap has been removed to expose the underlying burn layer. In the top of the image, a portion of the cap has been left in place. It has been cut cleanly to show the yellowish-brown chinking resting on top of the gray burn layer. This suggests that the house may have been burned very soon after it was abandoned, perhaps on the same day in the spring of 1865 when Union cavalry raiders destroyed the blast furnaces. Did the Yankees do it? At this stage, our evidence is still inconclusive but we hope that further analysis of our findings will bring us closer to the answer.

an excavation unit at House 2.

The chimney collapsed first, before House 2 burned. The image above shows the yellowish-brown chimney “melt” in the top of the picture with the gray burn layer at bottom. The edge of the melt is the base of the collapsed chimney mound .  The burned material has washed off the mound and come to rest at its base, a clear indicator that the chimney collapsed into a mound before the structure burned.

We believe that House 2 was occupied by male slaves, bachelors who were fed at a central dining facility. We think that the occupants of this structure were fed somewhere else because there was virtually no evidence of food preparation and consumption present. We have yet to find animal bone and only one or two pieces of tableware were found in the units within the “footprint” of the structure.  This contrasts strikingly to House 1 where a substantial number of tableware fragments were found along with hundreds of animal bones, forks, and fragments of a cooking pot and hanger. At the same time we found no indications of the presence of women or children. A thimble and a marble found at House 1 suggests the possible presence of both women and children. No such items were found at House 2.

At House 2 we found fragments of several pipes…………

……and bottles.

No evidence of food preparation and consumption at House 2 but plenty of evidence of pipe smoking and substances stored in bottles. We’ll have to think on these finding for a while.

good luck Anna, keep smiling, Jack

one final note: what is this?

This unknown item, like the Confederate belt buckle from last year, was found on the last day of the dig. Jes found it. Like the buckle, it is not exactly what would one expect to find in the Quarters but it was there, buried under several centimeters of chimney melt at House 2. It is a machine tooled brass object with a triangular hole cut in its base. It looks like something that came off of a piece of equipment, perhaps a small part vital to the functioning of some important machine at the iron works. If so, its presence in the Quarters might indicate an act of sabotage, a symbolic statement by one slave in the constant war of dominance and resistance that marked the antebellum southern world of slave and master, a world that was fast coming to an end during the brief few years that the Quarters were in existence.  It is also a reminder of the larger, more important questions we are dealing with on this site. We want to thank the participants of Summer Expedition 30 of the Alabama Museum of Natural History whose hard work in the hot sun made possible this next step in our investigation.

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We found the button  shown in this video at House Two at the opposite end of the quarters from House One.

Laura Dehmer, a history intern from the University of Montevallo, discovered the burned floor sill to her right against rocks. Since it was against the downhill side of the chimney pile and buried under clay chinking that fell away from the chimney, it survived. Other evidence that the house had burned was probably washed away over the years by sheet erosion. The question is, did the Yankees burn the house, or did it burn some time later? This is one of the important questions we hope to answer in June.

The chimney bases marking the sixteen house sites that comprise the Quarters are divided into two rows of eight houses each. The houses were built on a slope flanking a hollow. Last year we excavated the remains of one of the houses near the southwest end of the upper row. This year we will investigate one of the house sites near the northeast end of the lower row. We are hoping that two sites so far apart will be more likely to reveal any differences that may exist regarding dates and methods of construction, periods of occupancy and the identity of occupants. We will also open a few additional squares over the footprint of the house we dug last year in order to recover most of the surviving wrought iron cut nails used in its construction.  After this we will return the stones of the chimney base as close as possible to their original location and restore the original ground contour. We want the site to look just like it did when it was first discovered during our survey two winters back.

Jessica Brown, Field Crew Chief for the dig, examines the chimney base that we will be excavating. The large stone at center right is probably a remnant of the pier that supported one of the downhill corners of the house. From what can be seen on the surface, the house is identical to the one we investigated last summer; There is a shallow barrow pit just beyond the chimney pile where a loamy clay was dug up to use as chinking for the fireplace and chimney. There are stone piles at what were probably the two downhill corners of the structure. And the chimney pile itself is about the same size as the one we dug last summer.