Heritage West 12/6/24 Heritage West 12/6/24

Photogrammetry… seeing our units in 3D!

Most archaeology happens after the digging is over, and Heritage West’s work is no different! Since the close of excavations last November, the team has been focused on analyzing, interpreting, and documenting the finds from our four excavation areas at the Community Education Center in the North American Archaeology Lab at Penn. You can read lots of fun statistics about what we found in these early phases of analysis here. The success of our excavations and the fantastic effort on the part of our students and community volunteers in the lab last year means that we can keep being productive during the next phases of the project. Stay tuned for updates on more ways to get involved!

Now for an update on what we’ve been up to this fall, from Graduate Research Assistant Arielle Hardy.

Archaeology is inherently a destructive practice—once you dig the dirt out of the unit, you can never put it back in the same exact way—so ongoing documentation is a critical step in preserving the records of our excavation. Since our trenches were reburied (or “backfilled” in archaeology-lingo) when digging closed in November 2023, one of the first things we wanted to do was create a record of what they looked like at the end of the season. As we continue to process finds, this will help us understand where exactly objects were found in the ground, and reconstruct the process and timeline (or “phasing,” to use another archaeological term) of certain human actions that we saw while excavating… from the demolition of the homes in the 1960s, to the throwing away of garbage in the privy by the school in the 1930s and by the household on 35th St. back to the 1870s!

One of the best tools we have for this type of documentation is called photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is an archaeological technique that uses two-dimensional photographs—taken with a normal camera—to create three-dimensional digital models of objects and environments. By taking pictures from multiple angles, you can digitally stitch together a 3D image of almost anything, from bottles, to archaeological trenches, to people!

In these photos you see project director Megan Kassabaum and student Nikki Meyer taking photos of our excavation units during the last week of fieldwork in November 2023. In the background you can see various other students, staff, and volunteers helping to provide shade for the photographs.

Several computer programs help to build these types of models, and some favorites for our team members are Metashape and RealityCapture, but many phone apps (for newer iOS and Android devices) are capable of producing low resolution models too. Digital rendering is an important non-destructive method which helps preserve cultural heritage and communicate archaeological findings, making this material remotely accessible to local communities, cultural stakeholders, students, and researchers.

This fall, our team has been using the photographs taken of our four units at the end of excavation to build these digital models. We will be using them in our object documentation and analysis over the coming months, but the best part is they are publicly accessible too! We encourage you to check them out yourself by clicking on each of the four models below. (You can also find them in a bigger format on Sketchfab by searching “HeritageWestPHL”). Keep a lookout for additional models of finds that we will be uploading there throughout the spring!

Privy by HeritageWestPHL on Sketchfab

In this model of the privy unit, you can see the brick lining of the privy as well as the layers of fill in the privy pit. You can see several stratigraphic layers and one central feature. Material and waste were regularly added to these privy pits but it was also someone’s job to clean them out, removing fill and allowing the pit to continue to be used. Perhaps this central feature was part of the privy’s superstructure or related to infrastructure needed to clean the privy while it was in use. The visible slope in the layers suggest that more fill was removed from the center, while the soil near the walls was more likely to remain during cleaning... a pattern that has been identified in other privy contexts from this time period.

Foundations of a residential structure by HeritageWestPHL on Sketchfab

In this model of the structural unit, we see the corner of the stone foundations of the original wooden twin home that sat facing 35th St. We were able to excavate into the basement of this house. While we did not reach the original floor, we found several layers of deposition, which you can see in the profile wall . Some were filled with coal, while nearer the bottom, we discovered huge amounts of corroded iron sheet metal.That, along with a pipe that spans this exterior wall, led us to the conclusion that we came down on the remains of a coal furnace and that this pipe was a vent.

Brick Demolition Pile by HeritageWestPHL on Sketchfab

In this model of the unit closest to Warren Street, we discovered a large number of bricks and rubble debris from the demolition of the three brick row homes and the large-scale destruction of the surrounding neighborhood. Unlike the intact foundations of the wooden twin home, the lack of clear orientation of the bricks indicates the violence of this destruction event, very likely using a bulldozer. Also visible here is the white gravel which was used to cover the razed neighborhood.

Exploratory Trench in front of CEC by HeritageWestPHL on Sketchfab

In this model of the unit in front of the Community Education Center, you see a deep layer of crushed red brick situated alongside a zone of yellowy soil. Our hypothesis is that the crushed brick was added before the original Quaker Meeting House was constructed in the 1850s, as part of a large-scale project to raise the level of the site. The foundations of the expanded building, in 1901, then cut into that earlier leveling layer. The yellow soil would represent the fill of the foundation trench for that structure.

Heritage West 7/18/24 Heritage West 7/18/24

The CEC Site, by the numbers…

**Hi all! I’m Qi Liu, the summer intern for the Heritage West project.**

Over the past month, I combed through the object data recorded during the 2024 Spring lab season and used it to construct an Excel database for the project. So, seven months after the 2023 Fall field season ended, we finally have a bird’s-eye view of what we dug up! Of course, more in-depth analyses of this archaeological data are on their way, but we’re eager to share the preliminary results with everyone who’s been interested in and supportive of the project. In this blog post, we hope to show some general statistics of the excavation, put into perspective what archaeological work is like, and—most importantly—share our feelings of satisfaction and pride over the excellent work done in the past year.

P.S. from the Project Directors: If you want to read more about how amazing Qi is, you can check out this article about her in Penn Today!

Heritage West 5/4/24 Heritage West 5/4/24

Spring Lab Work

Our final lab day for Spring 2024 was a week ago and we have just finished getting everything cleaned up and put away. Over the last three months, the North American Lab has been bustling with project staff, students, and volunteer community archaeologists. We’ve held open lab hours two days per week, during which over 30 dedicated community archaeologists put in over 350 hours of hard work helping us process the collections from the Fall 2024 excavations at the Community Education Center (CEC)!

February was spent washing all of the recovered artifacts. Because excavation happens so fast, washing everything is a real process of discovery and we identified many amazing objects that hadn’t attracted our attention in the field. Here are some photos from the washing phase (click to see larger versions):

March and April were spent sorting all of the newly cleaned objects. We carefully examined each object and assigned it a category based on material type, function, and what it can tell us about human behavior. We counted and weighed all of these objects to create a full artifact catalog, and all of our community archaeologists added important notes that will guide our future detailed analyses. Here are some photos from the sorting phase (click to see larger versions):

These are just the earliest steps of our analysis of the collections from the CEC, but we’ve already learned so much. We’ve learned about the abundance and importance of coal for heating the homes that used to stand behind the CEC…. we’ve learned that people painted their walls in a huge variety of beautiful colors… we’ve learned about some of the various ways residents of the Black Bottom cooked and ate their meals, made their livings, and entertained themselves with hobbies… and we have learned more about the violent destruction of their community. Future analyses will focus on better understanding some of these stories and our next steps will collaboratively consider how to best share them with the public in meaningful ways. We look forward to sharing opportunities to get involved with those next steps soon!

For now, we want to extend a huge thank you to ALL of the amazing community archaeologists who joined us this spring, including many Penn students as well as the following volunteers (listed in order of how many days they spent in the lab with us):

Erik Weaver

Darnell Holmes
Marina Fonseca
Frani Rehbun
Louisa Pollack Pruitt
Nandini Subramaniam (and her mom!)
Alex Seng
Lydia Parke

Marty Ferris
Jantra Morris
Miranda Mathias
Frances Conwell
Robin James
Bryan Harris
Malaika Mumeka
Merryl and Ezra Gladstone
Shaylee Kish

Heritage West 12/11/23 Heritage West 12/11/23

End of Season Unit Updates

Our Fall 2023 excavation season ended on November 17th. Over the course of ten weeks, 12 Penn undergraduates, 4 Penn graduate students, and 22 community volunteers worked together to excavate four units. In this post we summarize what we have learned so far… but 80% of archaeology happens AFTER the excavation, so there is still lots more to learn… lab work will begin in January (with dates and times TBA very soon)!

Test Units 1, 4, and 5: 32 N. 35th Street (Structure)

This unit, located on the former site of a wooden twin home built in the early 1850s, consisted of three adjacent 1 meter x 1 meter (about 3 foot square) units. We uncovered a corner of the stone house foundation and excavated part of the basement, which had been filled in with trash and rubble when the house was torn down in the 1930s. A 1909 Indian Head penny, a diaper pin, and many fragments of plates and bottles were uncovered in the basement. These artifacts start to paint a picture of what life may have been like for the people who lived at 32 N. 35th Street from the 1850s to the 1930s. Abundant iron fragments near the floor, including the pipe pictured below, hint that household industry may have taken place in this basement.

Test Unit 3: 32 N. 35th Street (Privy)

The circular outline of this brick-lined privy (or outhouse) was visible on the surface of the CEC parking lot. Over the course of our excavation, we dug over 5 feet into this time capsule of life in the Black Bottom. The cross-section of the privy shown below is a view through close to 100 years of history relating to the people who lived at 32 N. 35th Street, their surrounding community, and the nearby Quaker school. Artifacts like slate pencils and a lice comb tell us about life in the school, while buttons, fragments of decorated pottery, and food remains hint at what everyday life was like for the people living in the neighborhood. A complete bottle tells us that sometime in the 1860s or 1870s, somebody drank a Weiss beer made by Johnston & Co. This beer was bottled here in Philly and was light, effervescent, and sour, sometimes served with raspberry syrup.

Test Unit 2: Warren St. Rowhomes

This unit was placed in an area where our geophysical survey had suggested a large area of rubble where three brick rowhomes once stood along Warren St. These houses, and those around them, were torn down during the large-scale 1960s destruction of the Black Bottom neighborhood. Our excavations confirmed this interpretation of the geophysical data, as we dug through a portion of this brick rubble. In addition to small objects that had been abandoned when the houses were destroyed, we also found many fragments of plaster that tell us what colors people chose to paint their walls and curb stones that would have once lined streets throughout the neighborhood.

Test Unit 6: Front of the CEC Building

This unit was placed in the front yard of the CEC to draw in people walking along Lancaster Avenue. While we did not know if we would find very much here, it turned into one of our most exciting excavations. The top layers contained lots of coal and broken pottery related to activities happening in and around the CEC building over its long history. After we dug about 1 foot down, we began to uncover a lot of red fill made of ground-up bricks. The history and purpose of this fill is still a mystery, but we are hoping to learn more about when it was placed there by studying the artifacts from within it in the lab.

A special thanks to all of our amazing volunteers and students (only a small sample of whom are pictured here)! We can’t wait to begin the lab phase of the project in January!

Heritage West 10/2/23 Heritage West 10/2/23

September Unit Updates

Our semester-long excavation at the Community Education Center began in early September. Since then, our crew has included eleven community members and ten Penn undergraduates, who have been working in four distinct excavation areas on the CEC’s property. In addition, we have had countless visits from people passing by to ask what we’re doing, share stories, and even join in the excavation. In this post, our students summarize what we’ve learned so far!

Students and community volunteers screen the soil that has been excavated to recover small artifacts.

Test Units 1, 4, and 5: 32 N. 35th Street (Structure)

(Summarized by Lauren Davis, Lily Davis, and Ashley Ray)

This unit is located on the former site of a wooden twin home, built in the early 1850s; our excavation here consists of three adjacent 1 meter x 1 meter (about 3 foot square) units. Two units have begun to reveal wall remnants from one of the homes (visible in the first picture below), while another unit may contain part of the building’s basement (refer to this blog post for greater detail). A gravel layer (likely from the 1960s destruction of the site) separates modern debris, such as nails (like the one held by a community volunteer in the second picture below), Rain-blo gum wrappers, and electrical covers (like the one in the third picture below), with artifacts from the 1930s structures (such as the 1927 penny in the fourth picture below). Additional findings, such as ceramic and iron and glass slag fragments, indicate that the location could possibly have been a site of household industry, and glass bottle shards may have come from a nearby dairy farm or been otherwise used by the people who lived in the house.