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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.