Rain, rain go away!

I feel like I’ve been doing underwater archaeology the last few days. There’s been more than eight inches of rain in the last week in Annapolis which has really affected the progress of the Fleet-Cornhill excavations. Because we are digging only a couple of hundred feet from the city dock the water table is already really high. In the unit where we found the wood planks we hit water around three feet down. We are only about one foot down and we’re already completely flooded. Here’s a picture of what the unit looks like each morning:

We use a hand pump and buckets to take out around 20 gallons of water at the start of each day. Then we have to continually pump water out of the unit throughout the day so we can see the soil as we dig. Working with saturated earth makes excavating really difficult because it's harder to identify changes in soil color and texture. Needless to say by the end of the day everyone is covered in mud!

When it's raining like this we can't excavate so we weren't able to make it out to the field every day this week. On our rain days we stayed in the lab to process artifacts and to look over our field notes. We also spent a day at the Maryland State Archives to do some historical research on the area where we're excavating. It's definitely not the romanticized version of archaeology you see in the movies!