Gardening with a Historian and an Anthropologist...

... makes for very slow work, it turns out!

Even though it was cold and windy out, I managed to convince Scott to help me dig up the garden (with the promise of a homemade dinner afterwards).  Theoretically, it should be pretty quick work, especially with two people going at it.  All you have to do is cut the sod into strips, roll it up, and cart it away.  This went well for the first strip--I was pleased to see that the soil had a good consistency and that there were plenty of worms and grubs to help turn over the soil.  This gardening stuff might turn out to be a good idea, after all!

When I started to pull up the next strip, however, I noticed a small white and blue object.  Upon further inspection, I realized that it was a piece of painted ceramic!  Of course now that I knew there were interesting objects in the ground, this meant that I had to painstakingly comb every strip before taking it away.  Scott laughed at my enthusiasm at first, but once I started pulling out more pieces, he started looking too!  We ended up finding pieces from at least two or three different objects.  I'm a little rusty with my ceramics knowledge (not that I had much to begin with), so I really don't have any idea if they're all that interesting or not.  If anyone has any inklings, let me know!

We managed to get about three-quarters of the yard stripped off, except for bits near the fencel ine that were difficult to cut into.  I tried to dig into one area only to discover a row of bricks buried just below the surface.  The outside edge of the garden it lined with bricks, since the sidewalk is slightly beneath the soil line.  I figured that this row was just from an older garden perimeter that was eventually forgotten and let to grow over.  They would have to be pulled out before we could start planting, so I grabbed the spade and starting digging.  I pulled up about three intact bricks, and went to try to find the next one in line.

This time when I went to pull out the brick with my shovel, I noticed that it wasn't quite as heavy as the other bricks.  I figured that perhaps it was broken, or maybe it was just a stone that got placed instead of a brick.  When I finally did manage to pull it out, it turned out not to be a brick at all!  It was a bottle neck, with the cork still intact (very rotted, but still there).  Our garden is right next to the sidewalk that leads to and from the neighboring villages, so I just figured that it was litter that had been thrown over by a passerby some years ago (although it was strange that they would have left the cork in!).  I put the fragment to the side and continued digging.

My spade hit upon another hard object, so I reached down to pull it out.  It was another fragment of a bottle, but it was a different color than the bottle neck I had just pulled out.  I looked more closely at the hole I had dug and realized that there were dozens of fragments of bottles of all sorts of different colors!  The archaeologist in me started to get excited, and I expressed this excitement to Scott.  Again, he laughed at my enthusiasm, took his obligatory glance at the fragments I'd pulled up, and continued working on his patch of the garden.  I was so excited, though, that I continued to make celebratory noises with each new fragment I pulled out.

Finally, Scott couldn't take it anymore and came over to see what all the fuss was about.  Of course, he insisted that his excavation skills were far superior to mine, took the hand shovel from me, and proceeded to start digging himself.  Turns out he's a natural--he pulled up a large can (maybe a small paint can?), with a small, intact glass bottle inside of it.  This discovery convinced him of the archaeological significance of the site, so he put away his large tools and sat down to excavate with me.  Our gardening plans all but forgotten, we spent the next half hour or so pulling up more objects from the ground.  Once I realized that it was more than just a few pieces of litter, I even started try to map the locations of the objects!

By the time we were forced inside by rain, we'd pulled up an entire bucket full of bottle fragments, four cans, a small intact bottle, a large intact bottle, five bottle necks with corks still inserted, and two more pieces of ceramic.  Scott said we should recycle them, but right now they're sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to clean and date them, just in case they are something to get excited about.  I found a website that might help--it's for dating American bottles, but maybe I can find some good references there to give me an approximate age of the bottles.  It's still really strange that so many of them were unopened, and in the same place.  Someone's forgotten secret stash?

The answer to this mystery must remain for the moment, because the sun has returned (for the moment), which means its time to get back to the garden!