We began the week by reading about our project on the front page of the newspaper. How exciting!

We have already been welcoming a steady stream of curious community members who have come out to take a tour of the site but, with this extra exposure, Bush Prairie  Farm is the place to be!

Pleased with the public’s interest in our project, we continue to make discoveries. Excavating around the hearth which was removed last week, we find . . . another hearth!

Extending our area of excavation around the original hearth has proven to be a fruitful endeavor, but even this pales in comparison to what we are finding in our newly discovered trash pit from last week. Here, we meticulously remove an axe head. This is just one of the many finds coming out of this excavation unit which seems to be bursting at the seams with remnants of the past.

Even more exciting, we find a deposit of burnt paper, with plenty of text and imagery still visible.

Using state of the art technology (Google), we are able to track down one of the burnt pages!

We are less excited about this advertisement for soap than we are about the date. Because this ad is from 1906, we can establish that the deposit must date from after that time. We carefully seal up the fragments of paper for careful analysis in the lab. These fragments have more stories to tell, and we look forward to finding out what they are.

With thousands of artifacts found, we clean up and say goodbye to the site for the year. It is time to put in some serious lab time, cleaning, processing, cataloging, and making sense of our many discoveries. We have uncovered the artifacts, and now we will finally begin uncovering their meaning.