Post the First

For several years I have sent 300 of my most intimate friends (among them, the SheepThrills Yahoo Group) a kind of diary of the SCRAP Field School. I will be posting most of these letters for this season here.


Once again, it's SCRAP field school. Technically, it starts on Tuesday. But several of us have been getting things ready for a couple of weeks. New players this year include Lauren the intern, who will be different from Lauren the ex-Manchester PD detective digger, who will be different from Loren, the so-far undifferentiated digger, and maybe one more, all female. Lauren the intern is going to be a senior at Franklin and Marshall College in PA. She is short, blonde, and determined. She has been trying to keep Dick from going crazy, something worth doing during the countdown to the opening day of field school.
This year we shall be finding out what lies beneath perhaps the last unhosed (technical term) piece of land adjoining Amoskeag Falls in Manchester. This was one of the best fishing spots in New Hampshire until the mills took over in the nineteenth century. People had fished there since at least 9000 years ago (full disclosure - it might have been 9000 BCE, not Before Present, which was in 1950 anyway. I'll get this straightened out, I promise). One way we know this is from the excavations of three other parcels of land nearby, at least two of them now under/hosed by the footings of the Amoskeag Bridge. The bridge was built in 1969; both the laws regarding historic preservation and the techniques available to archaeology have changed since then in our favor. The city was going to sell this parcel, possibly to a homeowner whose small house is on a small lot abutting the site. If the site turns out to be significant, the city will hang onto the land. The homeowner is being very agreeable about this, lending us his shed as a place to stow our equipment. We shall be perched on the edge of about a hundred-foot drop to the railroad, which runs right along the river. We will be slightly too far from the city center to walk in for lunch, but with the heat of the city and the traffic and the commute. I am trying not to be dismayed that I will be seeing my lovely housemates {Sarah who used to be the SCRAP lab supervisor whose job I am unworthy to try to fill--my call, not hers; and my baby daughter Ellie, the coming sophomore and keeper,as well as four cats, 12 chickens, and the frog outside living in a tub full of rainwater and broken jars} and my own bed and shower every night, but also the unmown lawn and the bills and all the other things I usually escape that make up a Responsible Adult. No sitting around imbibing with equally tired and dirty people who are also trying to get out of helping make and clean up supper. Not that I won't be trying to get out of it, just by myself, as both Sarah and Ellie are more inclined to cook and even to clean up than I am.
I haven't done urban archaeology since a month after Reagan was elected. This will also be the first time since then I've worked a site with a strong chance of pottery, lots of it, and lots of flakes. I am bemused: on the one hand I have been a happy Paleo snob; on the other, I like Finding Stuff, which is perilously close to being a goodie-hunter (they just like finding STUFF. Slippery slope).
The field school will run Tuesdays through Saturdays for the next six weeks. This year I shall not be moving from Mass. to NH, though my parents wil be leaving their home of the last 35 years for an apartment not far from the house -- they're happy about this, but the deaccession is killing them -- and my son will turn 21, God willing.