I think it was General Eisenhower who is credited with the truism that planning is everything, while the plan itself is nothing. The working archaeologist needs to keep that thought very close to their heart when they get out onto site, as reality often doesn’t match one’s pre-existing expectations. Quebec certainly isn’t failing in that regard.
The current excavations are intending to open up a total of eight trenches, three large ones of 20 by two metres, and five of one metre by five. These are distributed around the site so that we can explore the locations of the different historic map depictions of where the shoreline and islands are shown, to determine which most closely reflected the truth.
Our first reality check, yesterday afternoon, was finding the error of our ways in not mapping the larger, recent, shrubs when we surveyed the site in July. Several of the planned trenches, that looked so good on paper, needed to be moved – but thankfully Justin and I were able to find some good alternatives.
Then it was the archaeology’s turn to misbehave! One tries to go onto a site like this with some vision of what the archaeological deposits should look like – and the story of the Quebec sounded reasonably straight forward. However, the first three trenches in the southern part of the site all encountered great depths of dumped silt, where the theory says they shouldn’t be. I’d also have guessed that the bottom of the pond would have been lined with puddle clay – absolutely no sign of that yet, though there are some other layers of pale loamey deposits that may yet prove to be the lining. The instant reaction – and one needs to avoid those, except when writing for a blog – is that there may have been a major episode of excavation/destruction in the southern part of the site that we didn’t know about previously, and that may have removed all evidence of the Georgian features. Closer examination of the trenches in the coming days will tell us more.
Today was Heritage Open Day, and another flagship event for the project. The wonderful Lace Wars chaps were back again, and were even more popular than they were in July. The offer this time included a dig pit for smaller archaeologists, which proved immensely popular, perhaps more so with those to whom the other appeals of the event didn’t speak. The point of crossover was being able to watch the mechanical excavator at work, live. That was a huge hit.
On the other hand, the northern trenches didn’t entirely behave themselves either. Here too, in some cases, the edges of the feature didn’t show themselves readily – and it wasn’t until about 12:30 that we found anything that could be described as a shoreline. However, that situation improved somewhat in the afternoon, and more relevant changes in the archaeology started to become apparent.
The theory, before we started, was that we didn’t know what the edges would look like, but we assumed that they’d be well-built in stone and/or timber. What we’re finding is that, with one exception so far, they’re not, but are soft edges represented by a change in the substrate from silty deposits to ones rich in clay and pebble. Again, an instant reaction (that needs a lot more careful thought and investigation) is that that could well explain the changing shapes of the pond and islands on the various different maps. On the other hand, it's very hard to see how the feature would have been sustained at all with such soft edges. Could edgings have been robbed out when the pond was filled c.1900? That’s the sort of question we’ll want to answer before we’re done.
Meanwhile, we comfort ourselves with General Eisenhower’s words…
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