-
5 New Archeology at the Fort: 2011–12
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
- Additional Information
5 New Archeology at the Fort 2011–12 Do archeologists ever find something that is truly unique? There really are times when a lucky find causes us to be absolutely thrilled, surprised , and profoundly curious all at the same time. In the summer of 2011, when one of our field supervisors, Lauren Sheridan, discovered a brass arrowhead in the ruins of the East Barracks at the fort (fig. 5.1), all of these emotions became very real for us. Fort William Henry was a relatively recent site on the frontier, dating well after the first contacts had been made between Europeans and Native Americans. This ordinarily would mean that we should not expect to find artifacts from the early Contact Period—that is, European objects that were traded to Native Americans and modified by them into traditional forms and functions. Yet here was a piece of European brass, perhaps cut from a kettle and reshaped into a triangular arrowhead, and it was the very first brass arrowhead that we had found in twenty years of digging local British military sites from the French and Indian War. This projectile appears to have still been in use when most warriors on the frontier had switched over to European-style weapons. It was an exciting reminder that surprising finds really do occur on archeological digs. It should be noted, however, that Stanley Gifford had also found “Brass arrows” in the ruins of the fort (1955, 8), but like us, he could not determine whether they were from an Indian settlement on the site before the fort was built, or whether they arrived during its 1755–57 occupation by the military, perhaps as arrows shot into the fort. Overview After a hiatus of eleven years, we were asked if we would like to return to Fort William Henry to resume our excavations, and in July 2011 we commenced an additional two seasons of exploration under the sponsorship of the State University of New York Adirondack. We dug for six weeks each summer in 2011 and 2012 because we wanted to have a better look at the East Barracks, which we had only lightly tested in 1998, and we wanted a larger artifact sample from the food dump, or midden, that lies just outside 44 ✴ legacy of fort william henry the eastern wall (called the East Curtain Wall) of the reconstructed fort. Experienced volunteers plus students from several colleges took part each season, and within this very public setting, we were able once again to expose thousands of visitors to archeology and the history of the French and Indian War. One change from our work in the 1990s was that in 2011 we began giving formal archeological tours to visitors, offered three times each day by a fulltime guide, Dale Erhardt. We also advertised lunchtime archeology lectures to visitors on every day we worked, and we spent more time conversing with the lay public than ever before. Given our ever-increasing contact with visitors, we became more aware of some of the reasons why people choose to visit this frontier fort and, with a touch of irony, we noticed that the Canadian visitors to the fort tended to ask the best questions. They frequently knew much more about our colonial history than did our American visitors. Still, Americans who came to our dig could be quite entertaining—without meaning to be. On July 13, 2011, for example, a small boy walked up to one of our pits and asked, “Are you digging up bugs?” On July 22 another visitor asked, “Are you digging for worms?” And, somewhat embarrassingly, on July 26 a man said to his companion, “Look, dear, at the actors pretending to be archeologists.” Archeology can be very humbling sometimes. The East Barracks In both 2011 and 2012, we excavated a large block of pits under the northern end of the East Barracks, which runs north-south on the eastern side of the parade ground. Portions of this large foundation had been excavated in the 1950s, and at that time skeletons had been discovered within the so-called crypt close to the south end of the building (fig. 5.2). At the north end, Gifford ’s team found tools they believed had come from a blacksmith shop (fig. 5.3), but no drawings survived showing exactly where these features had been excavated, and it really was an enormous, largely undocumented structure. Still, news reports from Gifford’s day gave a sense of how...