Digging a couple of very precise holes in a parking lot – in the rain, no less – is more fun, or at least more satisfying, than you might think.
“This gives me a chance to act on an interest I hadn’t been able to act on before,” said John Porter of Goffstown, a mostly retired carpenter and energy auditor, as he took a break from digging and sifting Tuesday afternoon.
Porter was among a few dozen people, ranging from professional archaeologists to homeschooled children to volunteers like him, who participated in the Dig Days archaeology field school at 16 Pillsbury St., just off South Main Street in Concord.
For two days, the group very carefully dug about a meter down in a traffic island of the parking lot behind the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources building. It’s the last remaining structure from the complex that grew around Margaret Pillsbury General Hospital, the first building created just as a hospital in Concord.
The dig focused on learning something about the Foster Ward, a separate structure built to hold contagious cases: The parking lot island is a couple of feet behind what was the building’s back door. If you know where to look, there’s evidence of the footprint of the Foster Ward’s foundation in the settling and cracks in the parking lot pavement.
“Digging” doesn’t really describe what archeologists do, however. Every shovelful is sifted through screens on special shaking tables – one of Porter’s volunteer jobs is to repair the ingeniously simple wooden devices – amid very precise record-keeping, measurements and mapping. The idea is to find interesting tidbits in the soil and connect with other information, such as how far down they were and what else was around, to develop a coherent history.
In the case of Dig Days, the finds ranged from medical materials, including a syringe, to bits of brick or nails from the building, to debris from life as a parking lot, including “a huge number of cigarette filters.”
Historical finds weren’t really the point of Dig Days, however.
“The main idea is to show how archaeology works, the detail,” said Richard Boisvert, New Hampshire state archaeologist, who went on to make what is perhaps an obligatory Indiana Jones reference: “There are no fedoras, no boulders chasing us. No snakes!”
The state’s archaeology program has a history of involving the public in its digs, most notably State Conservation and Rescue Archaeology Program, summer programs that have been running for more than 30 years. This year’s SCRAP will let people excavate either at a Native American site in Holderness that dates back at least 2,000 years or among the cellar holes of a long-gone industrial complex in Livermore Falls State Park.
The work connects people to New Hampshire history, both fairly recent and in the pre-Colonial past, and helps to preserve that history.
For more information about SCRAP or other projects, go to nh.gov/nhdhr.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek)
