Pensacola Colonial Frontiers, 2009-2015: Progress despite the rains

Kelsey Bruno holds an iron implement she just excavated.

Two weeks into our 2015 field school, our crew continues to make steady progress, despite a number of delays and missed time due to rainy weather and saturated ground, along with the normal startup difficulties in getting our total station and new datums fully aligned with the existing site grid. One excavation located along the bluff slope has been effectively halted due to soggy ground, but a nearby shovel test at the foot of the bluff on the surface of the lower terrace has already begun to produce evidence of the sawmill that burned down here in 1884, including an iron tool or machine part (pictured above) and a possible corner brace, along with brick fragments. This shovel test should drop to the presumed floor level of the sawmill within a level or two, where previous probing with a steel rod suggests there may be a brick floor or other structural evidence.

Additional evidence for mill-era activity on the summit of the terrace where the mission had been located is also abundant as in previous years, including near-surface scatters of brick fragments, slag, charcoal, iron nails and other fragments, and late 19th-century glass and ceramics.

Notable finds this week include a heavy iron object that may be a tool or machine component (pictured to left), a distinctive brass fitting from an as-yet unidentified object or implement, and an intact cobalt blue Bromo-Seltzer bottle that appears to date between 1891 and 1907 (the latter two pictured below).

Bromo-Seltzer medicine bottle made in Baltimore between 1891-1907.

Brass fitting or fastener with decorative design on one side.

Three 1x2 m excavation units in the mission area of the terrace summit made good progress this week, including one unit that was begun in 2014 and will be finished this year with the excavation of its base into sterile clay subsoil beneath an unusual clay-lined pit feature that appears to date to the sawmill period, but which falls in line with a series of three posts just to the west that we believe might be a mission-era structure wall, perhaps even the long sought-after church. Ongoing excavations in two units to the north have been laid in along the predicted southern and eastern wall lines of a possible Apalachee circular residential structure with a clay floor and hearth feature found last year (along with a possible roof-support post nearby). These units are both capped to some extent by what now appear to be post-mission-era clay deposits, one of which is currently theorized to have been a logging skidway with two parallel trenches and evenly-spaced trenches traversing it, resulting from the placement of round logs in the ground to assist in the dragging of felled trees across the ground to the sawmill (perhaps the early 19th-century sawmill operated at some distance west by Thomas Cooper). When the skid road was replaced by a short railroad line in the Reconstruction era, the logs seem to have been removed and the entire roadway covered with a layer of hard yellow clay to fill in the trenches. Later, another layer of mottled gray clay was also deposited over and around the roadway in this vicinity, and the amount of charcoal, slag, coal, and small brick fragments here might possibly represent the location of the blacksmith's shop documented for Molino Mills, or it could also be associated with the railroad engine that transported wood to the main rail line to the east. Pictures of these clay deposits are below.

Emma Dietrich excavates the northern edge of the yellow clay that intrudes on mission deposits here.

Clear stratigraphic relationship between dark modern humus, mottled gray clay below, and brown mission-era midden deposit below that.

Underneath these clay deposits are the intact 18th-century midden deposit associated with the possible Apalachee structure. Students found several rimsherds of Mission Red pottery in one of these units this week, as well as an intact but battered small honey-colored chert gunflint (all pictured below). Within a few days we hope to begin seeing whether there are postholes extending below this midden representing the predicted wall line of the Apalachee structure surrounding the hearth found last year.