- Hi everybody, welcome
to the Archeology Lab
here at George Washington's Mount Vernon.
My name is Sean Devlin,
I'm the curator of
archeological collections.
This is my colleague.
- I'm Lily Carhart, I'm the archeological
field and lab technician.
- And we're really excited to
have everybody inside today,
to get a chance to see what we do
with archeological objects.
Lots of folks get to see outside.
Very rarely do we get
to have folks come in
and see what happens inside,
so we're excited to have
this opportunity today
to talk to you.
We're particularly excited because,
with the upcoming weekend events,
this weekend at Mount Vernon,
in association with
Virginia Archeology Month
and our own Day of Archeology
here at Mount Vernon
on Saturday, October 5th,
we thought we'd take this opportunity
to show you all some
objects that we have found
over the course of, well, quite
literally hundreds of years
of excavations out here at Mount Vernon,
and give you, perhaps, a
sense for some of the objects
that we've recovered from sites
that we'll actually be covering
in our new preservation tour
that has an archeological focus
over the course of this coming month.
We'll have that tour
available two times each day
this weekend--
- Two times each week.
- Yes, and then following this weekend,
we'll have tours available
on Thursdays and Fridays,
so I believe they'll
be a link in the video
for that information.
So please, do that, and
ask us plenty of questions
about what you're going
to get to see today.
So probably what we'll start out with
is the highlight items
that people always think
about when they think about
Mount Vernon archeology,
et cetera, right?.
And one of those items that we found
is this, it's actually a trunk plate,
and it may be a little
bit hard to translate
onto the video screen, but
it's actually inscribed
with the words General Washington.
So this is our George Washington item.
This is actually a trunk plate
that we have documentary records
that Washington purchased
trunks up in Boston
at the start of the Revolutionary War,
commissioned a local metalworker
to engrave some plates
to put onto those trunks,
and those were the trunks
he carried throughout the war.
When he came home to Mount Vernon,
apparently one of them
was broken and discarded
and we actually found this item
in an archeological site we
call the South Grove Midden,
which is a fancy archeological
way of saying trash pit.
And a number of the items we'll see today
relate to that site.
One of the other really amazing objects,
and this sort of gets at the length
of archeological exploration
here at Mount Vernon,
is this glass seal.
It's called a wine bottle seal,
and you can see there, actually,
molded into that is a A and W.
So that stands for Augustine Washington,
that's George's father,
that's the man who actually
first built the first iteration
of our mansion house
where it currently stands.
And it's really fantastic
because this object,
this wine bottle seal, was
actually recovered in the 1930s,
on the East Slope, so somewhat near
where we are excavating
for the new necessary
that was just found and
announced on our Facebook page,
and really speaks to the long history
of the Washingtons here on the property.
But, one of the real values
that archeology brings,
I think, is not just to
talk about folks like
George and Augustine, folks
that we might have great
historical documentation about,
but also to speak to the daily lives
of those folks, and also
all the other folks,
that maybe don't make it as
much into the written records
as might be more common with people
like presidents like Washington.
So, that might be the enslaved populations
that lived here at Mount
Vernon over the course
of all of its time as a plantation.
So we really have a lot of objects
that speak to that community,
to all the other laborers that are here,
indentured whites, other folks right here
on the property across time.
And that's kind of what
some of these next objects
are sort of dealing with.
It allows us to speak a little bit
about the types of jobs
that people are doing,
and really provides, I
think, a rich context
for what's happening here.
How does this landscape
look, how busy is it?
In the front, we actually
have a chisel fragment.
That was recovered from our
blacksmith shop excavations.
It's really kind of interesting,
'cause that's probably a tool
that was in the blacksmith's
shop to be repaired,
because it would have
been having constant use,
whether by indentured joiners
that Washington's contracted
to work on the mansion house itself.
Or possibly, as well, enslaved carpenters,
who were working on
lots of the outbuildings
that are around the plantation,
sort of helping the plantation
to continue to operate
as an agricultural enterprise.
A little bit closer to
home, literally here,
a little bit closer to the mansion,
are these objects which are
actually a dark green glass.
What's kind of cool is
that, it's a little bit hard
to visualize, perhaps, at the moment,
but these are actually
the handles to bell jars.
And if anybody's a gardener out there,
you may know what a bell jar is.
It's a bell-shaped piece of glass
that you put over, usually,
a tender young plant
as the seasons change.
It helps you extend the
season by protecting
that plant overnight
when maybe it's cold out
and might kill it.
And these objects were actually ordered
by Washington from England.
We know that there were
folks in the gardens,
laboring to grow food, and
also botanical specimens,
so it's really kind of a fascinating look
at some of the material culture
and different kinds of
jobs that were taking place
here at Mount Vernon.
We also have, next to it,
objects associated with sewing.
And this is kind of a
nice, fascinating point
because it allows us
to speak as well about,
as opposed to carpenters
or work that tends to be
associated with men, we actually
have documentary records
of Martha working with
enslaved women and girls,
teaching them sewing, working with folks
actually in the Washingtons'
bedroom, which is fantastic.
Great combination of documents
and archeological
evidence coming together.
And these materials, again,
come from the South Grove.
They also come from
the House for Families,
which is one of the main
quarter sites that's on our,
places where enslaved people
were housed on plantations.
That's what a quarter is,
but the House for Families
site will also be on our tour,
so we'll also be able to
talk a little bit more
about that with folks.
Course, one of the biggest
things that we find are ceramics.
And sort of continuing that notion
about what kinds of labor
are people doing here,
this is actually a milk pan,
so it would be used in processing dairy
in the kitchen here at Mount Vernon,
could also be sort of a all-purpose vessel
for food preparation and things like that.
Again, this is kind of
cool, because it begins
to sort of lead us into
the notion of ceramics
here at Mount Vernon, and
we really get a chance
to talk about a diverse array of objects
that are coming from,
literally, all over the world,
and are sort of being
funneled into Mount Vernon
through London, basically,
and through England
and other merchants in England.
So, to that end, we have in front of you,
an array which maybe we could
talk about a little bit later,
if folks are interested.
But an array of ceramics that are, again,
from a number of these disparate
sites that we'll talk about
on our tour, the House for Families,
South Grove Midden, the blacksmith's shop,
and some other locations.
But here, we can see these are all plates.
What we can kind of do as archeologists
is look at the very specific
elements of color, form,
decoration, and it helps us tease out
different time periods, so we can tie that
to documentation.
We actually are fortunate enough to know
when Washington ordered
some of these records,
and begin to tease out
time, using ceramics
which are rapidly turning
over at that time period.
And maybe, actually, what I'll do,
is give Lily a chance to talk,
because she actually does
a lot of our cataloging
with materials.
So maybe I'll let her have a moment
so we can talk about that, yeah.
- So, Sean just mentioned
about all of the differences
and all of these wide variety
of different ceramics.
Each one came in and out of
fashion in a different time,
every 10, 20 years.
But the way that we actually
distinguish between the two
is where things get a little bit more,
detailed I guess (chuckles)
So if you can see, this
gigantic large piece
of German stoneware, over here,
we have lots of reconstructed
vessels like this,
in all of the cabinets around this room.
They actually help us identify
the small, itty-bitty pieces
that are coming in from the
excavations in the field.
It does not come out of the
ground looking like this, ever.
At least, not here.
So here, right here, is another piece of
a similar type of stoneware vessel.
You can see that it has the
really small incised lines,
the very detailed botanical patterns,
and the very, very rich bright blue,
and that the gray is actually
pretty light colored,
which is the same as this
one, and it's fairly thin.
So this one, right here,
is also a stoneware,
but it is a very different type.
This is actually American-made.
And even though it also
is gray, it also is blue,
it also is a stoneware.
If you look at the
thickness, it's really dense,
it's really dark, it's much darker clay,
it's much thicker.
The decoration on it as well is not
that fine detailed bright blue.
It's wide brushstrokes with little stamp,
and actually that stamp tells us
it's from a pottery in Alexandria.
So that's sort of an example
of how we're able to figure out,
how we're able to distinguish
one type of material from another.
- [Sean] So it looks like
maybe we have a question
that just came in.
- Question?
- [Sean] Yeah, so that'd be great.
- [Facilitator] Cindy
is wondering, she says,
"Some pieces you seem to
have many of the same piece.
"Is that just a lucky find,
"or is it due to where it was located?"
- That is, actually, that's
a really great question.
Part of the variation you're seeing here,
in terms of, say, the
porcelain plate which has got
a large portion of it together,
versus this piece of stoneware over here,
which is just a singular,
sherd is what we call it,
a fragment of ceramic,
is because we've actually had
staff and volunteers come in
and mend individual sherds
together to form this plate.
And that's actually a layer
of one of the analyses that we do.
As Lily was discussing,
we go through our objects
as they come in.
We classify them, we think
about what kinds of forms
they might be, and that's our
basic level of cataloging.
That's what we do in here.
And then we use that information
to make interpretations
about the site and about the past.
Another level of analysis
is actually taking
all those individual
pieces and laying them out
on a table and actually treating it
almost like a jigsaw puzzle,
and beginning to stitch
the smaller fragments
back into their original
vessel forms, if we're lucky.
Now, almost certainly, we'll
never get a complete vessel,
even doing that process, because fragments
will have scattered, either
when it originally got broken,
when it got deposited archeologically.
Maybe that trash pit got
intersected by a utility line
sometime in the 1950s and
material got moved around.
So we almost never get a complete vessel,
but these really whole portions
are sort of the product of
that hard labor and work
that I as just talking about.
And it's also kind of cool,
not only does it tell us more
about the vessel itself,
that this is from a milk pan,
as opposed to just sort of
an unidentified kitchenware,
but it also allows us to,
because we know where each
of these objects came from,
in terms of their archeological context,
that the soils in which they came from,
and we excavate soils
that are different colors
and textures, and we keep
those objects separate
from each other, we can
actually begin to sort of say,
we can relate those
layers together in time.
Say if something's really low
in the stratographic sequence,
let's put it this way,
if we have two trash pits,
this is better, this is better.
We have two trash pits and
we have objects that mend
from those two trash pits,
we know that they were
probably open at the same time.
People were depositing trash there.
A single plate broken
in the middle of a room,
part of it got swept up
and put out the front door,
and part of it got put out the back door.
We have an idea about
when those trash pits
were being used then.
So that's the types of
extra analysis we do.
But maybe there's
another question as well.
- Hold on, one last little bit.
- Oh yeah, go ahead.
- But to speak to that too,
you asked about numbers.
And it does matter if we find more of,
let's say, a large earthenware
that looks like this,
all together, or if we're
finding more, let's say,
porcelain, all together.
The quantities of the
different types of materials
plays into our analysis of
what types of activities
took place, whether it's dining,
whether it's food
preparation, whether it's tea,
or things like that.
It can indicate different
things happening.
- [Facilitator] And that leads us
to a question we got yesterday.
We posted a picture of a
bunch of pieces of pottery
and somebody asked, "Were
these pieces trash in a pile,
"or were they broken during
the turnover of the mansion?"
- Yeah, those, do you?
- No, go ahead.
- The ceramics in that particular picture
are actually from a much later,
actually it's kind of fascinating,
because it cut through
the South Grove area,
which is just by the midden,
this trash pit that I was talking about,
and there's probably actually
pits behind the kitchen
so it's probably a work yard,
for roughly about a hundred years,
that space has always housed
the kitchen on the plantation.
And the space behind it
was probably a work yard
for most of that time.
In the 1940s?
- 48.
- They, our landscape team at the time,
decided to recreate the South Grove
by transplanting a large holly tree,
and they dug a very large hole
in the middle of that site.
- Very large hole.
- And it's kind of an
interesting look though,
because it does talk to what
we were just speaking of.
All the archeological
material that was there
that they dug out of this
big hole to put the tree in,
it was all jumbled up,
but it was still there.
So they dug this hole, put the tree in,
and then filled the dirt
back around the root ball basically.
So we excavated that in the--
- In 2015 is when we
actually dug the hole,
but we've been working on that project.
We just closed it up, so it's exciting.
- Yeah, it's one of our
contemporary projects.
So that's where those materials came from.
So some of it's like that.
Some of it is, like this midden site
that I was talking about, is
very much an active trash pit.
The House for Families
is actually a cellar,
so the very bottom layers of
that are probably actually
just bits and pieces that
people are either dropping
or working their way down to
the bottom of the household,
and are not necessarily
deposited there as trash,
but just sort of are the
things that are ending up.
Later, that cellar ends
up getting filled up with
purpose-dumped garbage, et cetera.
So, it really varies.
That's the short and sweet answer,
is that it varies quite a bit.
But actually understanding
how things got into the places
that they are is actually
one of the layers of interpretation
and analysis that we're
doing here as a whole team,
and that really ties in the whole,
the field needs to know
exactly what they're doing,
and recording that information.
We try and contribute the information
from the artifactual analysis,
and we bring it all together
to try and bring these
better interpretation
to life in the 18th century that way.
- [Facilitator] Nice.
And we have another question, from Amy.
She's wondering what the oldest
object that has been found
(Sean's laugh obscures speech)
We actually don't have too many of the,
we actually have a lot of lithic material.
There's an extensive native
American occupation here
for literally thousands of years
before the Washingtons come.
It dates back to the Archaic period.
I will not put an exact number on things,
but the date ranges
for that are generally,
are the Archaic period, so actually the--
- 6000 years ago?
- Yeah, very roughly, and
understanding that things
in that period end up getting date ranges
rather than a date.
- A date.
They can be as old as
roughly 6000 years ago,
all the way up to a couple
of thousand years ago.
- We'll be talking more about
that in November, so ...
- Hopefully, we'll have a chance to talk
about that in November.
I would say, just on the table, certainly,
the Augustine Washington
bottle seal is probably
one of the older objects we have here.
Certainly one of the few
objects we know we can associate
with George's father's
period here at Mount Vernon.
From the archeological
collection, I should say.
- [Facilitator] And we
did have a question about
Washington-era objects.
Specifically, Clay is wondering
what the average depth
at which Washington objects are found.
- That can really, really, really vary.
Because it depends what has been done
to the landscape since,
what the landscape looked like before,
if, for example, in the Washington period,
the grounds out, for example,
behind where the kitchen area was,
kitchen work yard was, and the slope
and the East Lawn and all of that area,
the ground was really irregular.
There were pits here and there,
so filling those in with
trash can be really deep.
But it can also be a couple inches
underneath modern surface.
So it really depends upon
what types of activities
are taking place and what
Washington did to the landscape,
what we have done to
the landscape, um, yeah.
- It can vary quite a bit too.
It's sort of turning
on what is the context
in which things are coming out.
So, again, to return to
the House for Families,
which we'll be able to show folks,
or at least the location where that was,
the cellar that was there was
sort of shoulder-height deep,
when we were excavating it,
plus a couple of feet
that have been removed
and more modern material
had been filled in
with utility lines et cetera.
So, you would be a full
person's height below ground,
to get at that Washington-era material.
The site that we excavate
at the Slave Memorial
and Cemetery site where we're documenting
an African American
cemetery that was there.
That's actually, ironically,
also where we're getting
a lot of the prehistoric/Native
American material
that we're actively
excavating at the moment.
There, that sort of thousands
of year old artifacts
are literally less than a
foot down below the topsoil.
And that has to do with
what Lily was talking about,
the cultural processes
and the natural process
that are happening out in the landscape.
So there can be a relationship
between depth and time,
but it--
- It can vary.
- But it needn't always
be deeper is older.
- Or one inch equals 50 years.
It's not always that exact.
- [Facilitator] I have
another question, from Donna.
She's wondering how much jewelry shows up.
- That's a great question,
that's for you, yeah.
- That is a very good question,
because we just had a visit
from a woman who reproduces
a lot of jewelry either from
here or from other places.
We do find, more so than
jewelry, I would say,
we find articles of personal adornment.
So, things like buttons and buckles,
and pins and things like that.
So we do have a couple that are over here.
They can be very, very
basic and straightforward,
but here's some examples
of more heavily decorated
styles of buckle.
So we've got a copper alloy button piece
that has all these
geometric patterns on them
that are molded.
You've got a more simple buckle,
but then also one that has a
more ornamental design as well.
And, again, they vary, and we find them
not as often as we find something like
various pieces of ceramic,
but they are not uncommon, I would say.
- What this is really fascinating too,
is I think this is one thing
that we always try and emphasize,
obviously here, as part of our job,
but it's intensely
looking at these objects,
and, right, these are a bunch of buttons,
but there are actually
really fascinating stories
about the production
and different techniques
in which they are made.
And also, better link to time, as well.
So, again, it all comes back to helping us
tell a richer story.
So some of these buttons are actually,
as Lily said, this is
a copper alloy button
that's actually all copper alloy.
It's a disk that has been stamped out
of a sheet of copper
alloy and then decorated
with this decoration on the
face, as you can kind of see.
The cover that she pointed is actually
usually attached to, most
often it's a bone backing,
and we actually have one of
those bone backings here.
It's a very different button, obviously.
But this, despite the greenness here,
that's actually bone, a bone button back,
that would have been
cut from bone on a lathe
and then drilled with
the sort of eye-holes
that would have then been sewn.
It might be possible to see.
I'm not sure if it's gonna
come through on the camera,
but right here where a little
bit of the edge is broken,
the last bit on the edge there
is actually the copper alloy
sheeting that was
punched out and decorated
just like this one, and bent
around the bone button backing.
So there's a little groove right there,
that's actually meant to receive
that crimp of the metal
face of the button.
Here's an example of a bone
button that might or might not
have been covered by metal.
You can see we don't have
any green coloration on it,
so it doesn't look like copper,
the green coloration on
that other button actually
is from the copper alloy
weathering on it, right?
So it's caused that
discoloration on the bone.
This one, it doesn't have
any green discoloration,
may actually have been wrapped in fabric,
which is another style of
button that was prevalent
in the 18th century.
So, again, even things
like buttons or buckles,
you can really drill down in on
and see different forms of manufacturing.
You can really get, too, as
well, we can now start talking
a little bit about what
would the items of clothing
that people would have been wearing,
even down to, do they have metal buttons,
do they have, would those
buttons have been shiny yellow
or would they have been
plated with silver or tin,
to, would they have been cloth covered?
And that begins to help
us, again, get back to this
always-present question that we have about
what was life like, back then,
and how can we use these
objects to talk about
how people were using
them in their daily lives.
Looks like maybe another question.
- [Facilitator] Yes, we had
a couple more, actually.
So, Fifer Dave would like
to know, (Sean laughs)
how often do you find
coins from the time period?
- Less commonly than everything else.
Not very often, I would say.
I mean, in addition to finding,
I don't know, we have a
couple actual full-size coins.
But we also find coins
that have been cut in half,
in quarters, in eighths,
that are used for their,
basically, weight value of silver,
as opposed to the coinage itself.
Yeah, but not very often.
It's maybe a handful.
We find modern pennies a lot more,
or pennies dating to the 1800s
but, yeah, does that sound about right?
- Yes, yeah, yeah.
- [Facilitator] And Clay
has another question.
Of the items you've cataloged,
what has been the most
difficult item to identify?
- The ones that are still
unidentified. (laughing)
- Yes, exactly, the ones we don't know.
That's right. (laughing)
- Uh, yeah, um, I don't know.
- You know what I'm always
struck by is there are,
and Lily is doing a lot
more hard-nosed cataloging
than I am, some days, but I
am always sort of struck by
the fact that, with a
little bit of extra work,
things that were unknown
can kind of radically snap into focus.
And we're lucky here,
we have a large staff.
And some of them are
experts at identifying
particular kinds of objects.
Personally, I sort of
gravitate towards ceramics,
Lily has a background and
interest in metalworking,
iron working, so we have
nice complementary skills.
Another staff member of
ours, Sierra Medellin,
who works as a digital
preservation specialist,
is really fantastic at
looking at clothing items,
and has provided us some
really fascinating information
and hard work in that regard.
So, yeah, you sort of
have to accept the fact
that you can't know
everything necessarily.
And we also do--
- Definitely, and we
revisit things as well.
Like, for something that's very bizarre,
we'll have photographs taken.
Sometimes we'll even keep it out
so that, if other people
come to visit the lab,
we'll say, "Oh, any ideas?"
Because, for some reason,
it's slipping our mind.
We can't figure out what this is.
Actually, we post about
that on Facebook, often,
and try and crowdsource help, basically.
For example, our head of horticulture,
and head of operations
and maintenance helped us
identify something, which were
lightning cable tree spikes.
That was pretty bizarre, too,
'cause it looked like something
we thought we should know,
but had no idea what it was, so ...
- And Lily raises a really good point.
We're fortunate here at Mount Vernon
that we work with a bunch
of other professionals
in their own fields.
- Yeah, we do.
- So we're housed within the same
department as our
architectural colleagues,
so they are literally in the next room.
I cannot count how many times
I've brought objects over there
and sort of said, "Hey,
have you guys seen this
"in the 18th century material?"
And the same with our curatorial
and collections colleagues.
They have the material that
never made it into the ground.
They have the stuff that folks preserved.
And we're able to really go back and forth
between each other and compare
the objects that we have.
Hopefully for everybody's
benefit in that regard.
So, yeah, we've got a
community here in the lab,
here at the estate,
and then we draw on that
broader community as well.
- [Facilitator] Nice.
I think we have time for
just a couple more questions.
So, Karen is wondering
if you've found any items
related to the sundries that
George Washington ordered
from Robert Cary and Company in London.
- Now that is a great question.
I don't know if we've got
anything that I would want to
put out there at the
moment, but what I will say,
is use this as an
opportunity to talk about
the great documentary records
that we have here at Mount Vernon.
So, exactly that question
about Robert Cary,
I know we've got somebody in the know
on the other end of Facebook Live.
But we have, actually, in some cases,
we have quarter records
that George Washington
is sending over to the
merchants that he uses
in London, in that case,
for this Robert Cary merchant house.
And the way that that would sort of work,
just for folks who maybe are not familiar,
planters like Washington
would take, basically,
their agricultural produce and ship it
over to England to be sold.
That money that they would
make from the sale of that
would then be used as
credit to buy up a list,
a series of goods that they
might have sent orders over for.
And then those goods would be
shipped back here to America.
So we've got some really
great order records
from prior to the Revolution,
that allow us to document really
when did George Washington
order certain things
like cream ware ceramics,
or like salt glazed stoneware
ceramics for his table.
So that is a real benefit that we have
that a lot of other places
don't actually have,
is that strong documentary record
that we can kind of play
back and forth with.
- [Facilitator] Nice.
And we have a couple questions about digs,
which I know is not exactly
what we're doing here today,
but, folks are wondering
how frequently do digs occur
at Mount Vernon, and then
somebody else wants to know
how do you decide where to dig?
- Both good questions.
- We can maybe, I think
those are great questions
for our field crew.
I will suggest maybe
that the work that we do
is sort of driven by
the needs of the estate,
as well as research questions.
And maybe in the next Facebook Live,
our field crew can
discuss a little bit more
about how those two priorities track.
- Or you can go meet
them at the excavations.
We do have, we can't answer that one.
We have ongoing excavations every day.
We have two sites.
Monday through Thursday,
usually, we'll be out
on the East Slope at the Old Necessary.
If you're on the mansion,
it's out to your right.
And on Fridays, we're at the
Slave Memorial and Cemetery.
Stop by.
- [Facilitator] And maybe
we'll end with this one.
(laughs) We've got people asking
what the coolest object is,
and then, maybe, helping
you narrow it down,
what's been your most
rewarding, favorite find,
for each of you.
- Most rewarding, favorite find.
All right, well, I'm gonna
take you guys over here
a little bit and talk about things
that we haven't really got to see so far.
So these, well, these two boxes down here,
are some of our more modern
artifacts that we come across.
Just to quickly over, go over them,
we've got a light bulb from
the earlier 20th century,
Gumby, a Gumby toy, a Brownie
ring, a Monopoly piece,
and two tokens from the electric railway
that came from Alexandria to Mount Vernon
from the end of the 19th
century through the 1930s.
And up here, we actually
have pieces of an umbrella,
which is kind of fun.
So all of this speaks to the tourism
that occurs at Mount Vernon, all the time.
And to me, it's actually
some of the most interesting
elements of all this,
is also, who's visiting Mount Vernon,
and how do we, as archeologists,
keep finding evidence of that, over time.
Yeah, so those have been
kind of the fun ones.
- I'll maybe do the
dorkier, more boring answer.
'Cause those, actually,
those are really fun.
I think those are some of
the coolest objects we have,
to sort of speak to visitors here.
But I would also put in a plug
that relates with the
archeological approach to stuff,
to literally to stuff,
is that all of it has a story to tell.
And I will say this, I've
been lucky enough to work here
for three years so far,
and what I've been constantly surprised by
since starting here is how,
that trunk plate is fantastic,
it's got a great story,
but even little pieces of window glass
have their own story, right?
- Very much.
- So we're learning about
how things were made,
how things were used.
All of it really comes together
and even the most lowly object
can have a really exciting
- Very much.
- invigorating story to tell.
So, that's my little bit there, yeah.
- Sums it up pretty well, I think.
- [Facilitator] Well thank you guys
for joining us today.
Can you just remind us again,
how people can come, learn more.
- Yeah, so we're doing Archeology Day,
this Saturday, October 5th.
I always get the dates wrong in my head.
But I believe it's 5th.
So we'll actually have tours,
two tours, archeology
tours available that day.
There'll be a number of events put on
by our education team, that are
focused on engaging families
of all ages with archeological
concepts and ideas, activities.
And then, you can see Lily
and I in the Greenhouse
here at Mount Vernon,
where we'll be hosting
a meet-an-archeologist event
in the afternoon that day.
I believe all that information is also up
on the website in terms of
times and things like that.
And of course, we're here every day.
And you can always reach out to us.
We love to answer
questions or talk to folks.
- [Facilitator] Hopefully
we'll see you guys
this weekend.
- All right, well thank
you all for joining us too.
- Yeah, thank you.
- [Facilitator] Thank you.
