Today we passed the halfway point of the 2016 Field Season, and the amazing discoveries continue.  Building on the success from yesterday, we continued to explore the location of the earliest European occupation of the site. We opened several more test units, and while we have not yet discovered any foundations or structural remains of the circa 1690 home of the Broad family, we continue to find the traces of their presence through the artifacts they left behind.  The artifact of the day from that portion of the site was a beautiful French gun flint discovered by volunteers Ilka and Rosa.

fBack at Eutaw House, we continue to complete the excavation of several unfinished units with the house’s cellar.  Today we completed a unit near the northeast corner of the house, where we found a significant number os bricks on Saturday.  During the excavation today, we recovered a large collection of clothing fasteners and other personal items, including beads, jewelry, and buttons of every make and type: bone, shell, glass, copper and iron. We also found a Belgian one cent piece that dates to 1845 and a pipe stem manufactured by Jan Prince, from Gouda in the Netherlands, dating to the same time period. At the bottom of the unit, we made yet another interesting discovery: a flagstone floor!  This is the only section of the house to have a built floor.  All other areas of the cellar contained only a dirt and bedrock bottom. The presence of the abundant brick, stone floor and a variety of buttons leads us to think that this  portion of the house may have served as the Eutaw house’s laundry and the workplace of several of the family’s enslaved men and women, including Venus Tilghman.