Ashleigh: I have loved every minute of it.
It’s been a really exciting time to come
out here where it’s obviously a very beautiful
setting, get together with other students
from other departments, as well as the professors,
and really use this as a living laboratory.
Maureen: While students at the college will
take the introduction to archaeology class
in the classroom, here out at a Dixie plantation
they get actual hands-on experience doing
field work so they can apply what they learned
in the classroom in a field setting.
They can take all of the different techniques
and methods that they read about in their
textbook and actually put them into practice.
Rachel: We’re actually doing real live excavations
here and finding some early 18th century structures.
The one we’re at right now is the church
and then back in the woods we have a parsonage
foundation that we’ve also found.
Ashleigh: In this front part is the foundation
of the church.
The bricks in front of it are actually probably
what we most likely suspect to be the front
steps of the church, so it would be a nice
gathering area before Sunday services.
We’ve been finding pipe stems, lots of bricks
of course and little pieces of glass that
would have been from the church windows, which
is kind of exciting to find those still intact.
Maureen: Since this church was abandoned,
we didn’t know anything about the architecture
of the church.
As they uncover it for the first time, each
day we’re learning more and more about the
architecture, the culture, the social interactions
of the people of that time period.
Rachel: We actually found the finished floor.
There are some paver, there’s one paver
still left, so that was really exciting so
we could concentrate on what it was actually
made of.
Maureen: Over here, the students are excavating
at the very top of the cross where the altar
would have been placed.
Just recently we discovered that while the
church had a central paved isle that came
up, that the altar itself was not actually
on the same horizontal plane as the rest of
the church.
Ashleigh: The highlight of being out here,
I think it’s honestly just been working
with the other students.
We’ve all been able to teach each other
something, getting to meet people from different
departments, having their new insights brought
into what the interpretations could be for
this site itself.
