Summer 2011 Excavation

With a crew of ten undergraduates, mostly from local universities, the eight-week field season extended from early June to the end of July and was extremely productive. We recovered more than 250 bags of artifacts that will now be washed and analyzed in the lab (at City College and Columbia).

Best of all, many of these artifacts can be associated with two specific households. We found the foundation walls and many objects from inside the home of William Godfrey Wilson, a sexton for All Angels' Church who lived in a 3-storey home near the church with his wife and eight children, and we excavated the backyard of Nancy Moore's home (later occupied by the Webster family a bit to the southeast.

In the latter area we found the buried surface dating to the period of the Village, the ground on which the Villagers walked and on which they discarded many sherds of broken plates and glass, pieces of smoking pipes and butchered animal bone (apparently mostly beef) which suggests that someone in the Village vicinity was able to do butchering. From this area we hope to be able to recover information on the environment, including plants that were native to the Village and those representing the foods that were consumed there. After the lab analysis is complete we will be able to provide information on the lives of the residents of this community, bringing them into the present and making them part of New York City's known history.

Nan Rothschild and Diana Wall
August 2011

Select an image below to view the panorama