Digging in Salt Lake City, July 2005

This Is The Place Park staff backfilled the excavation units this morning and another park crew will spread new topsoil and lay sod on Monday morning. Our landowner will have his yard back instead of a 4m x 4m hole with two huge backdirt piles. I managed to finish the drawings and closing photos over the past two days. Chris and I are both eager to move things back into the lab to continue analysis.

An overview of the dig on the final day, looking south.

The peels both turned out pretty good. I've packed them flat for transport back to the lab. the sediment on the site was pretty coarse, so the rubber wouldn't roll without stressing the chunks of clinker and wrought iron nails stuck within it. You can see the picture of one of the peels below:

One of the two peels being removed from the sidewall after the rubber has set.

That peel captured the strata under the parking area. You can see a 1 meter section of the sidewall in the picture below. I really can't believe how much of the site remains well preserved.

Picture includes one meter segment of the profile of the western sidewall of 2N2W.

Remember that our current interpretation of the strata hinges on the clay layer dating to about 1900 when Frederick Petersen died, the clinker underneath from the 1890s-1880s, the sediment under the clinker from the 1880s-1870s, the roof tile and clay layer from the 1860s, and the clay undine all from before 1860. We'll see if that interpretation holds up in the lab as we begin analysis of the artifacts and sediment samples.

Another overview from the final day, looking east.

The picture above provides a good overview of the dig's ending. The walls are clearly visible, including the small extension we dug to show the top of the wall. The site produced just over 50 bags of artifacts for analysis, many of them were pottery wasters, kiln furniture, or other fragments related to the business. We also found lots of dietary bone, which surprised us in such a large quantity.

After reflecting upon the dig during the past three days of drawing, mapping, and photographing, I thought I would record some of the interesting odd things Chris and I have learned. Keep in mind that in archaeology "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!" In other words, just because you don't find purple-spotted Martian space ship fragments in your excavation, you can not conclude that purple-spotted Martian space ships don't exist. :

1. It seems that neither Frederick Petersen nor any of the family members smoked. We found only one small fragment of a white clay tobacco pipe and would expect to find many more at a work site. Smoking was quite common before the World of Wisdom doctrine became widely practiced among Utah's LDS households. The Petersens don't seem to have smoked very much, or at least not in this part of their workshops.

2. We didn't find a single tin can. If we'd been surveying at a mining town in the Great Basin from this time period, we'd have surveyed hundreds or even thousands of cans and can fragments. Even in the city's heart, a local agricultural population does not buy many of the processed and packaged food stuffs available during that time. Perhaps, however, they just reused the cans or dumped them somewhere else.

3. The tile and clay form a sturdy platform for something. While a few clay working machines can be heavy and might require such a foundation, I also suspect that other things may have sat upon the platform. It was about the size and shape for a small forge one might see in near the horse barn on a working farm. We'll examine the clay samples closely. Forging casts off tiny little bits of metal into the air around it. We'll find them with magnets and examine them under the microscope. We'll see what we discover.

4. We've got some clay samples to compare against his pottery fragments. The changes in the chemistry might help us to understand if the clay used in the architecture is the same clay as the pots.

5. We did not find his kiln remains, but more importantly we didn't hit his waster pile. I would expect that forty years of production would have left many more wasters which failed in the kiln during firing. Perhaps Frederick had a very low failure rate. We'll see why the samples we have were rejected and that might help us to understand.

We'll keep posting to the blog now that we've entered into the lab phase of the work. Chris or I will make updates about once per week through the fall semester. You'll find the lab blog linked from here starting in late August.

I hope you enjoyed the blog during the excavation! We'll try to do this again when we return for more excavations exploring Utah's cultures during the nineteenth century.

Cheers,

Tim Scarlett

Self portait of the professor in his his pit.