Some Post Excavation Thoughts: Snowdon Vulcan Iron and Machine Works

Hello Everyone, 

        Things have been busy for me this past month, so I haven't had time for an update. The John Snowdon and Son's Vulcan Iron and Machine Works excavations in Brownsville, Pennsylvania have come to a close for this field season. I cannot thank the volunteers enough and the students from the WVU Field School who came out to pick through some of the toughest fill material I have ever encountered. We have recovered an incredible amount of data dating back to the turn of the 20th-century. Personal items, industrial artifacts, and a variety of little unidentified items that will keep us busy for a long time. However, we also have the most important artifact, the foundry itself, a mausoleum to 19th-century industrialization in the Monongahela River Valley. It is my estimate that we have excavated 5% of the total structure. We haven't even begun to excavate within its interior except along the foundation walls. 

      In the first three photographs show an air pocket that we hit during excavation. Within it are the remains of a barrel laying on its side. The strapping is just visible to the left of that concrete floor joist support. When the building was demolished by the railroad, the area next to that floor joist created an air gap with brick from an interior wall. No artifacts were found with the barrel that would indicate its contents. the final picture is Erin who came out do some mapping of our foundations!   

Air gap with barrel strapping.

Close-up of the barrel remains.

The Completed excavation unit with exterior wall to south. Barrel removed.

Erin field mapping in the shade!

Snowdon and Sons: Random Archaeology Pictures

Hello Everyone,

        I thought I'd just post some random pictures from the excavation for some weekend viewing. Hope you enjoy!

Don and Carl

Julz excavating around bottles

Sean cleaning the foundation of debris

Our mascot Riley

A view of the foundation with railroad ballast (fill) on the left (dark Stain)

Snowdon Foundry: Influencing the Younger Generation to Archaeology.

Hello all,

Zander Harden

 This is a mini post showcasing two of our younger members in the SPA Mon-Yough Chapter #3 who come out to volunteer. We hope that their exposure to archaeology and historic preservation will make them better stewards of our town's history. Because the excavations are public, we encourage children and young adults to come out and get a taste of discovery first hand. As archaeologists, sometimes we become desensitized to history, we ourselves begin to take it for granted. However, for the people, the stakeholders of the communities in which we live, us archaeologists are a bridge into their past. To many people, this bridge to the past is shrouded in a fog of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and often misguidance. We must reach out to the public for interpretation and acceptance of their past, no matter how harsh or contested. It is our job to hold the public's hand and guide them through the fog into a knowledgeable and tangible past. That is what sets us apart from historians, people can actually take the past into their own hands and ponder the artifacts and perhaps make a connection with those who created and used them. Children and young adults are the future consumers of heritage, if we don't educate them on what is valuable then we'll have many many more Rick Savages using a backhoe for a quick buck. Yet if we, the experts, teach the children of our community the societal and cultural value of archaeology and preservation, then perhaps we have justified our existence.  

Chaze Eddings

Chaze Working on Straitening those Walls!

Zander and Carl Exploring the North Foundation of SVIMW

Zander checking out his work.

I found Something!

Julz and Chaze cleaning out the South Excavation Block.

Snowdown and Sons: Field Pictures.

Hello Everyone,

 Things have been running on overdrive at the Snowdon Site! We are in the process of completing our first field season there at the end of this week, although it looks like we may be there next week as well. We've made a startling discovery as well, that I will elaborate on in my next post. For now, here are some great photos of this past week's field work. Enjoy!

Julz and Kyle

Outside North Foundation Wall

N116-120 E100-108 Excavation Block

Volunteer Chaze Excavating around the remains of puddled iron

Kyle holding the remains of a leather sack! (We also have the contents!)

Carl Mapping a portion of the exterior North Foundation.

    

Snowdon & Sons Vulcan Iron and Machine Works: Day 4

Hello Everyone,

A volunteer and Jonathan Crise cleaning the foundation.

       Today was a rainy, overcast, and dreary day in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Most archaeologists would have called it a rain-day and went home. Not us. The well drained soils of the concrete and railroad fill makes digging in the rain possible. Besides, does wet concrete make it any easier to dig through? NO! But a good maddock does. I only have two photos today of some archaeologists at work in their trenches. The foundation of the foundry seems largely intact with a sharp break for about 3 feet. The it turns into a pile of bricks, and then back into a cut stone foundation. From a photograph we have, it might represent where a crawl space was located. Only more time and more exploration will tell. Right now, I have to get back to transcribing oral histories from river workers here on the Monongahela, take care. 

Carl Maurer excavating the layer of brick at the bottom of his unit.

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Angel Sit Part 3: Site Stratigraphy.

Hi Everyone,

This is the third part of my continuing series on excavations at the Father Angel Site in Greene County, Pennsylvania. This part examines a concept borrowed from geology called STRATIGRAPHY. Basically, stratigraphy is layers built upon layers. Much like a wedding cake if you slice into it, you'll see a layer of cake, a layer of icing, maybe a layer of chocolate, and then another layer of cake and so on. The Earth's crust is formed in a similar way, with layer upon layer of rock built one on top of the other. So what does this have to do with archaeology? Well, archaeological sites are created in the same way. Depending on where the site is located, it may have many layers like if it were on a floodplain, or just a few layers like out in a farmer's field.

So why is stratigraphy important? To start off, let's imagine a trashcan. I throw a piece of crumpled up paper into it, and over the next few weeks, I fill it up. Then I realize that a piece of paper I threw in that first week was an important bill! Where in the trashcan would I look? Not at the top of the pile, those papers are very recent. Not in the middle either, while they're old my bill was from a week before those papers were thrown in. I would dig to the very bottom of the can because that's where the oldest pieces of paper are located. So the stratigraphy of the papers in the trashcan led me to my bill, because I knew that the oldest pieces of paper were on the bottom. This is the LAW OF SUPERPOSITION. Layers are deposited in a sequence of youngest to oldest be they sedimentary rock layers or cultural layers containing artifacts.

In this video, I'm talking about the stratigraphy of the Father Angel Site. Please turn up the volume on you speakers! For some reason, the audio is very soft!

The Angel Site Part 2 Excavation

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Father Angel Site in Greene County, southwestern Pennsylvania! This blog post is about some of the methods employed by archaeologists

The first thing everyone needs to know is that there are several phases or steps in conducting archaeological excavations. I'm going to explain each phase to make it easy to understand the work involved in doing field work.

Phase Ia- Background research, property research, deeds, death certificates, etc.

Phase I Survey- digging small .50m X .50m square or round shovel test pits (STPs) and screening the soil for artifacts. These holes are placed on an imaginary grid, with a datum point (beginning point) and aligned either to true north, grid north, or magnetic north.

Phase II- At this phase, there were artifacts were found in the shovel test pits, and these pits were expanded to 1m X 1m shovel test units (STUs). These are 1 meter square and can be a meter or more in depth depending on the soil conditions. Let's say, a floodplain of a stream or river compared to a farmer's field.

Phase III Site Mitigation- At this point, a substantial site has been discovered and a large excavation must occur. These projects are big, expensive, and can be long term, from weeks to months to several years! This is the point at which the most of a site is excavated. I say most, because archaeologists generally do not dig 100% of a site. We like to leave a portion for future archaeologists with better tools, equipment, and technology to excavate to get better information.

On today's video, I'm visiting the Father Angel Site once again. Here we see two students taking the field school excavating a 1m X 2m unit with a 1m X 1m unit attached to it. Archaeologists love squares, their are like a small window into the past. The larger the square, the larger the window!

In this video are Shari Bechtel from California University of Pennsylvania, Marissa Miller also from Cal U, and Jamie Waldrop from West Virginia University. You will see them troweling and gathering the soil into a bucket. From there a person takes it to the "screener" where she will sift it through a mesh screen revealing the artifacts. The Father Angel Site is at a Phase II level of excavation depending on what they found there, it will probably go to a Phase III next year! Watch on and see the archaeologists at work! throughout the nation to conduct their field surveys.

The Angel Site

Hi everyone! Our adventure is just starting into the realm of archaeology. For those of you following me on Twitter, I've already said that 90% of all archaeology takes place not excavating, but doing research in libraries, archives, and historical societies. However, in the late spring, that ground has thawed from a long winter, and the smell of fieldwork is in the air!

Today I visited the Father Angel Site where a very good friend of mine is conducting a field school to teach budding anthropology and criminal justice majors the art of archaeological excavation. The field school is a joint collaboration between California University of Pennsylvania and West Virginia University where students from both schools get the opportunity to get some "hands" on training.
The first video in this series is an interview with Dr. John Nass from California University of Pennsylvania who is one of the lead instructors on the Father Angel Site. As he explains, the Father Angel Site may be one of a variety (or combination) of site types. In Pennsylvania, archaeological sites are submitted by people (land owners, amateur archaeologists, contract firms) to the state on a very specific form known as a PASS Form (Pennsylvania Site Survey Form). On this form Dr. Nass tells us, the site has been described as possibly Late Prehistoric earthwork.


Paleo-Indian Period (10,000 to c. 8,000 BC)
Early, Middle, and Late Archaic Periods (8,000 to 1,000 BC)
Terminal Archaic Period (2,000-1,000 BC)
Early, Middle and Late Woodland Periods (1,000 BC- AD 1,000/1050)
Late Prehistoric Period (A.D. 1000-1580)-possibly the Father Angel Site!


There is also a rumor of speculation the site maybe a French and Indian War encampment or a settler's fort from the 1770's. The great thing about archaeology is that every site is a mystery waiting to be unraveled.
Why is the Late Prehistoric important? There are several reasons, the first one being that the Monongahela Indians that occupied the Monongahela River Valley never directly made contact with white European settlers. As one can see from the dates, the Late Prehistoric extends well into the contact period after 1492 AD (when Columbus sailed the ocean blue...). It is possible to find European trade goods such as beads, copper, wampum, glass, and ceramics that point to a complex trade network where European goods passed from one native group to another. The second important feature of the Late Prehistoric is the migrations and incursions of native groups into areas where they traditionally had not moved before. During this time period, Monongahela people's villages become larger, and heavily fortified with the addition of palisade walls, perhaps to protect them and their lands from pressures exerted by other Native American peoples moving into their territory.

I urge everyone to watch the video, it is the first in a series that highlights archaeological survey and the equipment that archaeologists use in the field. The Father Angel Site is important in piecing together the prehistory of southwestern Pennsylvania, and helping to give voice to those Native Americans that time has muted.