Mixing things up a bit now; this post will focus on the third and fifth episodes of Time Team America. Both episodes focused on historical archaeology so the concepts conveyed in each are similar enough to talk about them together. A post about the fourth episode (dealing with pre-historic archaeology) will follow. The third episode of Time Team America had the Team working at the area that used to be the town of New Philadelphia, Illinois. New Philadelphia was the first city founded by an African American, Frank McWorter, in 1836. It was also a place where blacks and whites lived without segregation, which was almost unheard of during that time period. This is an important site to everyone but especially to the founders’ ancestors because it is an important part of their social and cultural history. Time Team was invited here to help find the remains of the schoolhouse that was supposedly built there. Because the area has reverted to agricultural land for many years and was heavily disturbed by plowing the geophysical data was not as helpful as it has been at other sites but they still managed to get a good blueprint of the area where the schoolhouse was believed to have been built.
While the team didn’t end up finding the site of the schoolhouse in New Philadelphia, they still gathered some very important information. This episode offers an important, though often disappointing, lesson regarding archaeology: you won’t always find what you are looking for but also just an important thing to note is that what you don’t find can be just as valuable as what you do find.. They may not have found anything spectacular but it was still possible that they were looking in the right spot. The schoolhouse is believed to have been a structure composed of mostly wood. Due to this, very little material evidence would survive since the town was abandoned around 130 years ago. So even if they were digging in the correct location there may be no evidence left of the schoolhouse especially since the field has been plowed. More information about this project can be found here.
Next, The fifth and final episode of Time Team America had the team working on their last site, Fort James, in South Dakota. Fort James is one of the few forts built from stone in 1865. During its time the land where Fort James was built was considered to be the “Wild West” and was an important part of the expansion of the U.S. This fort was built by a cavalry unit for the purpose of keeping peace between the locals and the Sioux that lived in that area as well. Here the team had the challenge of trying to locate the perimeter of the fort to learn how large it actually was and if it actually followed the plans in which it was supposed to have been built. Sections of the stone walls could be seen on the surface but, for the most part, the wall was buried. Geophysics came in very handy at this site where they were able to find sections of buried walls as well as identify anomalous areas that were not in the original site plans.
What was interesting in the Fort James episode was the use of the geophysics equipment. The most interesting find was a rectangular area not on the plans that the team believed to have been the stables. On the geophysics maps it was clear that something was most definitely there but after digging a unit on a small section of the area nothing showed up archaeologically. The geophysics specialist still believes that this is the site of the stables and what the equipment picked up was soil that was more compacted from the constant presence of the horses in the stables. Of course at this point you can’t say that this was the stable with 100% certainty but there is a good chance that a more extensive archaeological excavation could corroborate the geophysical data. Although the geophysics data wasn't that spectacular at the New Philadelphia site, it did show that items as small as a few iron nails could be detected with their equipment, which is quite amazing to think about.
One thing that was interesting to me about these episodes were the histories behind the areas. They did a great job explaining everything in a fair amount of detail to give the viewer a very good idea of the area and its history. They used a lot of records and oral histories, as well as visual imagery from the team’s artist, to accomplish this understanding of the site. With historic archeology a fair amount can be learned about a site by looking at historical records like newspapers and military documents as well as reviewing the folk and oral histories of an area. This knowledge can be incredibly helpful by directing archaeologists to specific locations or events to investigate . Historical archaeology, like in these episodes, can help to test the accuracy of the records and see if things really were the same as what the records say.
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