Weeks 2, 3, and 4 of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Survey

So, a few weeks ago, I set up my project and the work I planned to do at Evergreen Plantation. To summarize briefly, we were looking for buried architecture near the slave quarters. We started with GPR survey, led by Bryan Haley, and the image below shows our old GPR survey grid and the anomalies that me and my team excavated this summer.

We decided to place a GPR survey grid north of Cabin 1 because that is where several descendants have described the location of the church used by free people of color who lived at Evergreen. In our GPR grid, we identified several anomalies worthy of investigation (GPR 1-3). Ideally, in world with limitless volunteers, time, and money, we would have excavated more anomalies, but we only had time to excavate 3 anomalies, and that was just barely.

GPR Survey Grid from 2020

GPR Anomaly 1

Actual Excavation Image of GPR Anomaly 1

Test Unit 1 Bottom of Level 2

Anomaly 1 actually only turned out to be brick rubble and a lot of metal, ceramic, and glass artifacts. We did not find any intact architecture here but this was an exciting unit because of the artifacts. Unfortunately, our analyses are ongoing, so I don’t have terribly many artifact pics to post up yet.

GPR Anomaly 2

This anomaly looked interesting because of the parallel “blobs”, so I decided to excavate a 1×1 meter unit over it.

We placed the unit right over the anomaly, a difficult task in its own right, and low and behold (!) we found intact bricks laid in courses just under the ground surface. At this point, we had no idea what we’d found, but it was fascinating and cool!

TU 2 Bottom of Level 1

Tara Skipton describing the color of bricks and sediment in our test units.

As we continued to excavate and open test units near this anomaly, it was clear we had found something intact and preserved, but it wasn’t clear exactly what we’d found. In level 1, we were finding whiteware, lavender glass, pipe stems, and lots of nails (wire/square, kinda hard to tell until we get them analyzed).

Bo Wynn, excellent volunteer, and me, “supervising” work in progress by Gloria

Crawfish making themselves at home while we work…

The mornings at Evergreen were always spectacular!

Makenna Chandler and Chloe King-Pedroso hard at work, trying to figure out GPR anomaly 2.

Well, its kinda starting to look like something….

As were excavating, it became clear that we had an intact archaeological feature, but it took some time to full expose the feature. Even then, once we could see the full extent of the bricks, it wasn’t clear to me what we had found.

Test Units 2 through 9 excavated down to the top of level 2

Test Units 2 through 10 full open, some of level 2 removed in one unit

Once we had this totally exposed, it took some talking through with colleagues and walking around the property to arrive at a eureka moment. What is it?

THE BASE OF A CHIMNEY!

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Once we looked around in the other existing slave quarters, it became apparent that we were looking a the base of a chimney, that had 2 fireboxes and that was likely in the center of a building. Based on chimneys in other quarters, we should see a base that is open at the bottom like we found in our test units. I initially thought this was a chimney built on the ground, for a building that was constructed on the ground as well. This would be super odd for Louisiana, where most buildings are constructed on piers, sills, posts, or raised off the ground in some way. But after looking at the existing structures and the ways in which the chimneys were constructed, I think the building we found was also built up on piers. We did not have the opportunity to expand our test units broadly enough to find other piers or footings associated with this new structure. But the image below shows the hypothetical outlines of a building based on the size of other slave quarters at Evergreen and the location of the chimney base we found

Hypothetical structure outline based on location of chimney base, excavation unit, and dimensions of existing structures

Now…. there is something really fascinating to talk about in regards to this new building, but I’m going to leave that to another post…

GPR Anomaly 3

GPR Anomaly 3

This was the last anomaly that we were able to investigate.

GPR Anomaly 3, actual excavation image.

This was another fortunate and amazing find, but unfortunately, we’re not really quite sure what it is. The bricks are fairly soft and old and they’re held together by lime mortar, but we don’t quite know how far these bricks extend out and how deep they go (if they’re footings or something like that.

Mapping in brick features

At any rate, I’m super late in getting some of this stuff posted, and I have so much more to write about this summer, my collaborators, our findings, and what it all means, but for now, this is all…