Archaeology Field School is Over

Yesterday was the final day of the archaeology field school at Kingsley Plantation for this year. DH came home last night and asked me to download all the pictures on his camera. Now he's back at Kingsley all day today doing clean-up and I'm home with all these new videos and pictures to look at and share. Hmmmmm, let's see...

A nice shot of the gardens, benches, and the back of the house:



People digging holes:



People standing in holes:





A person demonstrating just how close to human-size the units are:



A demonstration of how easy it would be to turn the units into kiddy pools:



Storm damage:



Sad, wet DH on public archaeology day:



More sad, wet people:



An energetic approach to sifting dirt:



A more relaxed approach to sifting dirt:



There is always at least one silly, entertaining video of the students and this is it. It's the Kingsley Slide y'all!

Public Archaeology Day at Kingsley Plantation 2012

It was a very wet Public Archaeology Day at Kingsley Plantation. This was how the day began:



It then rained off and on all day.

There were moments when it seemed like the rain had moved on and the students would be able to set up demonstrations of the work they had been doing,





but then the rain would begin again.



Excerpts from the 1:00 p.m. talk in the barn.



During breaks in the rain, I was able to walk around reading new interpretive signs and trying out the new path from the barn area to the cabins.





Inside Anna's house:


I also encountered some of the wildlife.

Field School Time Again

DH at Kingsley Plantation:



Once again, it is time for University of Florida archeology field school at Kingsley Plantation and, once again, DH is working and living there. Last week was the first week of work. Then Blaze and I went up there over the weekend. I returned home with a few of the pictures and short movies that DH had taken during the week.







The students are digging in the "yards" of the slave cabins.











There is a nice video about Kingsley Plantation and the archeology work that is on-going at the plantation, on the Florida Public Archaeology Network website:
http://www.flpublicarchaeology.org/resources/videos.php?video=KingsleyPlantation

The Cabins and Creatures of the Night

This past week, a friend asked me to post pictures of the slave cabins at Kingsley plantation, but since this was something I've done before, I decided that nighttime pictures would be more interesting. I talked DH into walking up to the cabins Friday night. Blaze didn't want to go, but there were two other children staying there who acted interested until the very last moment and then backed out because they were scared.

We hadn't made it to the cabins yet, when we heard a scream that sounded like one of the children and briefly saw the light of a flashlight, so we thought the kids were trying to sneak up on us and scare us.

We could see people moving away from us, so we figured they had returned to the dorms, and we continued on our way.

















Just as we reached the restored overseers house near the gate, a car pulled up with a bunch of very loud people, but they didn't stay long.

We had just started back towards the dorms, when we saw a flashlight again and I saw two people, crouched down, running across the lit area near the barn ( I don't think I've mentioned that the park gates lock at 5:00 p.m. every day). It didn't take long to realize that it wasn't the kids. There were more than two people. We stayed in the shadows, so they couldn't see us clearly, and I took a flash picture in their direction to try to scare them away. One of them didn't scare so easily, though. He decided to try to scare us away by acting like he was in a position of authority. "Who are you?!" He shouted. We didn't answer."I said, who are you?!" He yelled again.

"Who are you?' DH asked back.

"Do you know the park is closed?!" He yelled.

"Yes," said DH, "Do you?"

I flashed the camera in his direction.

" What are you doing here?" He walked a little closer, with his flashlight pointing in our direction.

"I live here. What are you doing here." DH asked as I took his picture again.

DH took out his Ipod and began pressing buttons like he was making a phone call and the guy, along with his friends, left pretty quickly.

Within 5 minutes of us getting back to the dorms and telling what had happened, there was a good size posse of archaeologists ready to chase down the trespassers. They didn't catch up with them, but it wasn't for lack of trying.


The dorms being guarded by the ghost tortoise:

Some Kingsley Critters

The raccoons have been particularly good photo subjects this year. This one taught me a valuable lesson about never setting down food outside. I only left those rice cakes unattended for a moment.





This young raccoon was not the least bit scared of people. It was out in the middle of the day during the public archaeology day, expecting the tourists to feed it.

Here it is licking an ice cube that was thrown to it:







Blaze and I were playing around in the barn, when we noticed birds flying in and out of the open back window.



We discovered these baby birds living in a hole in the wall:



Tortoise eggs:

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.



Blaze learning to have a gentle touch with the scoop:



And to trim tree roots:



Time to go home. The students covering the holes, so they can go home for the rest of the weekend: