As the excavation teams, we managed, participated in, and recorded the digging of the three excavation trenches at the Women’s League Cabin site.  On the following pages you will find specific descriptions of the location, stratigraphy, and artifacts found at each trench, along with more detailed and researched explanations of particularly interesting artifacts.  The final page shows 3-D models of each trench created through photogrammetry.

Glossary of Terms:

Any terms seen in bold in an excavation page are listed alphabetically here:

Cataloging – An inventory of archaeological data in which an artifact or a group of artifacts are labeled described in detail. This makes analysis of objects easier while doing lab work.

Ceramic Sherd – A sherd is a piece of broken pottery, meaning it has been fired in an oven, making it brittle but difficult to fully destroy.

Context – A horizontal layer of soil that is defined by the substances found such as soil type or evidence of interruption. This physical location is important when analyzing any finds because it can give an archaeologist a sense of time passing if the farther down contexts are assumed to be older.

Excavation Logs – Forms carefully filled out by an excavation team that define each context.

Human Sources – Historical archaeology can rely on sources from both documents, – such as the floor plan for the WLC cabin – and from oral histories, which can be seen in the oral and documentary history tab.

Pedestalling – Leaving large rocks or our case, pieces of cement in place and excavating around them. Seen with the concrete pavers in trench 2 and some smaller pieces of concrete in trench 1.

Sifting – Loose dirt from the trench often obscures smaller artifacts. The solution to this is to pass the soil through a wire surface that separates the artifacts from the small dirt particles by allowing the soil to pass through the holes in the wire.

Shovel Shaving – Scraping along the surface of the trench with a flathead shovel and depositing the resulting loose soil into a bucket to be sifted.

Troweling – Using a flat, triangular tool to slowly scrape the surface and load the soil into a bucked to be sifted. Much more delicate than shovel shaving, so more appropriate if there is a high likely hood of finding sensitive artifacts.