wanderlust: And We Dig, Dig, Dig, with a Shovel or a Pick

This week I went on possibly the coolest work-outing ever. I got to participate in an archaeological dig in a cemetery!!

St. Ambrose Cemetery is in Deadwood, SD -- a big mining town back in the day. The cemetery just got a big grant to rehab all the fences, clean the headstones, and put up interpretive signs. There's this weird little section of land below the road that used to have headstones according to an old aerial photo, but there aren't any anymore. And the mortuary that held all the burial records for Deadwood burned in 1935, so there's no other way to tell if anyone's buried besides digging.

the upper cemetery

The city wants to know if there are still any people buried in that part of the cemetery. If so, they'll formally include it with a fancy fence and sign. If not, it'll be converted to parking. So out job for the day was to try and find bodies :)

Just looking at the lower section, it was clear that there were graves there at one point. There were several rectangular depressions signifying ground disturbances. And they were arranged in rows which seems very graveyard-like. The crew had used some ground penetrating radar earlier, but there was too much ground vegetation to get a clear reading, so we had to dig test pits.

The first one we dug was up near the road where the photo had shown headstones. We got down about 10 inches and hit our first artifact! A piece of bone! But it was cut and small, so it was from an animal. But we kept digging and here's an inventory of all the cool stuff we found

many, many pieces of plates and bowls
lots of animal bone
a shoe
the heel of a show
lots of glass bits
a bottle
bricks
a small, ceramic figurine
a bucket handle (found by yours truly!)
and a couple rusty cans

We think that the plates and bowls could have held offerings at one point, as could the glass bottle. All the artifacts were pretty jumbled in the pit suggesting that the ground had been disturbed after they were placed there. That and the absence of a body most likely means that the person who was in that grave was reburied somewhere else.

We dug two more test pits in other spots, but neither yielded human bones or even any more artifacts.

It's amazing how much you can tell just from the dirt! The soil in this area is very clay-ey and a grey-green color. but the soil where we were finding the artifacts was more like farm dirt and a dark brown. That made it a lot easier to tell where the graves were and when we had reached the bottom.

I also found a worm during my turn in the pit. I picked him up and flung him aside. The lead archaeologist was pretty impressed that I didn't get squeamish :)