Students have been hard at work collecting hundreds of artifacts from the Bush Homestead site, however, until recently, the vast majority of these artifacts have been broken pieces of ceramics, glass, and nails.

This week students uncovered a couple of really interesting artifacts.

This artifact is a double sided felling axe head.

Next, we uncovered this peculiar artifact. At first glance we knew that the item was a crank of some kind, however, we could not decide what the purpose of the crank was. Later, students were able to identify the crank as a bicycle crank with the remains of a pedal attached.

We also uncovered our first feature! Features are important in archaeological contexts because they are artifacts that are either too large or inseparable from the site. In this instance, the feature is a deposit, which means that it is represented by a change in soil composition. The feature we uncovered is a deposit that was left behind after someone had a fire. This particular deposit tells us that nothing has disturbed the ground below the fire since it took place.

Students ended the week closing out their units, next week we’ll be back on site to back fill the open units and the rest of the week will be spent finishing up lab work for the season!