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Date: | Thu, 4 Nov 2004 21:30:18 -0500 |
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Amber:
The job posting at VCU prompted me to write to you regarding the Castlewood
Collections that VCU recovered a few years ago. They are now back at
Castlewood courtesy of Keith Eggloff at DHR.
I had asked him to keep an eye out for them as they did their inventory,
especially since no one here had a clue what was excavated. A few weeks
ago he called to say that he had found them and I asked him if we could get
them back so I could use them in our site interpretation and as I hope to
do some excavations around the plantation house in the near future. I
picked up the artifacts and a thin binder of field notes a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately no maps of any sort have been found yet. I have, however,
been somewhat successful in figuring out what was excavated based on the
scars still visible in the field and a few clues in the field notations
that I received.
Considerable time was spent trying to figure how numerous EU#s could be
assigned to the same coordinates, and then I realized that each feature had
its own EU# and used the primary EU#'s coordinates, without regard to where
the feature was actually located!
The main problem was that I never realized that they were working in 2.5
METER primary units. Not one of the EUs had any measurement or scale
mentioned! I had a rough outline of the excavation based on the visible
scar, but I thought they had dug in 5 FOOT units, which just didn't match
well. After two days of fiddling with the notes and my drawings I finally
figured out that they had used metric and it all fell into place.
Perhaps you can enlighten me on a perplexing situation I have noticed
... Apparently the crews did not dig very deep although they were finding
old materials. They were also finding newer materials mixed in, as well as
linear brick scatters, one patch of which they considered a robbed
builder's trench. The crews seem to have stopped once they hit the top of
this brick scatter. I am beginning to think, however, that they were in
patch of old soils that had been redeposited in the 1960s when the
outbuilding was moved to its present site and the land regraded. Add to
that the fact that we now know (and they should have known then) that the
actual site of the kitchen and other structures was right against the back
of the house, over 50 feet away (photos of the buildings have been in our
archive for a good 15 years). Do you know anything at all about this dig
that would confirm my suspicions that they realized they were in disturbed
soils and that they were actually 50 feet from the site of the
outbuildings, thus the lack of resolution and reporting for this site ???
Should Keith find more material and return it to us I will let you
know. Thanks for your help in the past in our efforts to track down this
material - it is so important to our interpretation and to have no record
of any of it was quite frustrating!
Dan W.
Daniel H. Weiskotten
Acting Executive Director
Chesterfield Historical Society of Virginia
PO Box 40
Chesterfield, VA 23832
Office = 804 777-9663
Cell = 804-868-5088
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