Pit 132: Level 1

Completed on September 25, 2021, by Kim and James Masters, Gary and Sue Kelly, Jocelyn and DC Locke, Odess and David Brinkman. The weather was just right on this day for digging, and we had a good set of diggers. Joining us for the first time was Kim's son James who caught on quickly with the sifting. Today, we started a second row on the side of Brookcliff Road. Sifting is a lot of work in this area where we get a lot of gravel and asphalt from the 1960's road construction. The soil conditions also caused dirt to stick to the artifacts, so it is difficult, for example, to tell the difference between a piece of brick and Native American pottery or even a rock. So, the basic instructions to the sifters is to save everything that is not organic, and we will figure it out later during the cleaning phase. That cleaning would, in fact, show we found an unusually high number of Native American pieces (for level one) as well as a high number of Granby pieces. We also found a lot of clay pieces which are rare in the Granby dig. We will be on the lookout for that in the next levels. Finding clay at deeper levels could point to the clay cap of a privy hole. There were also some neat finds from the last 60 years, including parts from a toy train and pieces of a circuit board, and a small capacitor like those found in the old transistor radios of the 60s/70s.

Pit 132: Level 1 produced: 1 kitchen pottery, 7 stoneware, 1 kitchen glass, 2 window glass, 5 nails, 13 Native American, 1 shell, and 24 slag.