Over the Crescent Moon: Kingsley Plantation Public Archaeology Day 2011

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Kingsley Plantation Public Archaeology Day 2011

Yesterday was Public Archaeology Day at Kingsley:

The poster was slightly inaccurate, but close. I think it's the fifth year, not third, that Dr. Davidson has taken field school students to Kingsley, and it was D.H. who gave the talk about the sugar mill at 1:00p.m., but all the rest was correct.

If any of you has looked at the pictures from last year, you will see how much progress the students made this year on the well behind the slave cabins.

One thing that is very impressive, is that they have uncovered some of the 200 year old wood that supported the well (you can see two pieces sticking out of the floor in the center of the hole). Things rot quickly in Florida. Wood that touched the ground in my garden disappeared, back into the earth amazingly quickly, so I was really surprised to see wood this old, especially some place where it would have been wet.

D.H. explaining how they knew where to look for some of the buildings that are no longer standing on the plantation.

I'm sorry about the sound quality on this. The constant breeze, made the hot temperature almost bearable, but it interferes with the microphone on my camera.

D.H. telling the crowd about the pig buried under the sugar mill floor.

Students, hard at work in the sugar mill:

D.H. showing a child's clay marble that was found in the "fill" that was used to cover the sugar mill:

A piece of rusted chain in the sugar mill. The students will be working to uncover this and find out if it is attached to anything.

Putting the kids to work:

Working on the floor of a mystery building:

Screening the dirt from the mystery building:

A very old, burned stump. Not exactly what she was looking for. She had hoped to find some of the burned remains of pre-Kingsley slave cabins. She got the burned part right.