Our "next to last day" for our summer field project at the Sam Davis Home was almost perfect -- a relatively cool morning to finish paperwork, no rain, a brief hot spell in the early afternoon, and then a relatively cool late afternoon (relative to what July can be anyway!). In the morning, we worked on finishing our mapping and record-keeping -- double-checking all of our forms and drawings to make sure we hadn't overlooked something. Other students worked on completing our metal detector survey grid to cover the entire eastern yard area. Others worked on preparing our excavation units for backfilling.
"Backfilling" is the bittersweet end to a field project -- for five weeks, we have worked carefully to remove the dirt from across the landscape of the Sam Davis, sifted it to retrieve artifacts, and discovered the features beneath that survive to tell us about the past. Today, we began to "un-do" all of that work -- putting the dirt back where we so carefully excavated.
We are pleased and excited by what we were able to discover in only five weeks -- what we have learned about the past residents and the landscape of the Sam Davis Home, what we have discovered about "archaeology," and what we have discovered about working as a "team." Putting the dirt back into our so carefully investigated and recorded excavations is a "rite of passage" in many ways -- it provides an exhausting and poignant closure to our intensive interactions over the past many weeks.
As shown in the photograph below, on June 9 we were just beginning our investigations at the Sam Davis Home...
As shown in the photograph below, yesterday our excavation area looked like this...
Most of us stayed until 5:30 pm today to finish filling our excavation area -- most of us will remember this in painful ways in the morning! As the photo below shows -- we have restored the area as closely as possible to they way we found it. The fence is back up, the units filled and covered.
On Friday -- our final day -- we will be cleaning our equipment, work areas, and loading up to return from the Sam Davis Home to Middle Tennessee State University. That will be our final entry for fieldwork this summer -- but labwork will begin next Monday on washing, cataloguing, and analyzing the thousands of artifacts recovered.