Featured Fragment Blog
50th Blog!
This month celebrates our 50th blog post and in honor of this anniversary we will be revisiting our top three most-popular blogs. To see which blogs made the cut, please follow the links below. To date, our most popular blog, reaching almost 7,000 people on Facebook...
A “Classical” Case—Creamware at the Fredericksburg Riverfront
By Kerry S. González For our devoted followers, you may remember seeing a blog post back in 2015 on the creamware fragment below, found in 2013 during our Phase I survey of the Riverfront Park in Fredericksburg, Virginia (Photo 1). We are revisiting this piece because...
The Nose Knows: A Perfume Bottle from Fredericksburg
By: Kerry S. González Often times local residents interested in the history of the area, or more specifically the history of their property, bring us artifacts to identify. Most recently a long-time resident of Fredericksburg brought us some materials found during...
It Was Colonel Weedon With a Candlestick on Sophia Street: Another “Clue” to Fredericksburg’s Past
By Kerry S. González and D. Brad Hatch This month we are once again highlighting an artifact recovered from our Riverfront Park excavations in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The candlestick fragment pictured below is made of brass and is typical of the late Georgian/early...
Dovetail Needs Your Help!
By Kerry Gonzalez Continuing our blog series on artifacts recovered from our Riverfront Park excavations in Fredericksburg, we would like to highlight the wine bottle seal pictured below. Marking wine bottles with personalized seals were done near the end of the...
Jaw Harp Found in Fredericksburg
Music To Our Ears Mouths: A Jaw Harp Found in Fredericksburg By: Kerry Gonzalez This month’s blog will continue our series on Dovetail’s recent excavations at the Riverfront Park in Fredericksburg, Virginia where over 10,000 artifacts were recovered. Many of these...
When Building Fragments Come Together: Foundations at the Fredericksburg Riverfront Park
By Kerri Barile One of the most exciting finds on an archaeological site are the remains of a building or structure—evidence of people modifying their natural world to create a controlled space. Whether it is a dwelling, store, barn, or other building, the activity of...
Coming Unglued: The Importance of Reversibility in Artifact Conservation
By Reagan Andersen In this month’s blog, we are highlighting a whiteware basin with a flow blue Scinde pattern from the mid-nineteenth century. The object was brought to the Dovetail lab by a curious owner from Stafford County. The vessel had once been broken into...
A “Killer” Artifact for Babies
A Partial Bone Disc Recovered from the Houston-LeCompt Site By Sara Rivers Cofield and Kerry S. González This month we are going to revisit an artifact that Dovetail recovered from their data recovery excavations at the Houston-LeCompt site in New Castle County,...
Frog Legs: The Other White Meat
A Wrought Iron Frog Gig Recovered in Randolph County, North Carolina By Kerry S. González People have been consuming frog legs for centuries. In 2013 National Geographic reported that 10,000-year-old cooked frog bones were found in England , long before the French...
Making Stone Tools the Hardaway
Making Stone Tools the Hardaway: A Paleoindian Artifact from the Graceland Site, Randolph County, North Carolina By Joe Blondino It’s no surprise that archaeologists like old things. That’s why we get particularly excited when we find artifacts dating to the...
A Brush with a Hog
A Brush with a Hog: Cleaning Your Teeth in the Nineteenth Century By Kerry Gonzalez In 2018, archaeologists from the Maryland Department of Transportation State Highway Administration (MDOT SHA), Applied Archaeology and History Associates, Inc., and Dovetail Cultural...