Featured Fragment Blog
Musical Musings
Featured Fragment – Instrument Fragments of Houston-LeCompt By Kerry S. González In the summer of 2012 Dovetail Cultural Resource Group conducted a large-scale excavation at the Houston-LeCompt site in Middletown, Delaware sponsored by the Delaware Department of...
Signed, Sealed and Delivered
Featured Fragment – A Lead Cloth Seal from John Lee Pratt Park By Dr. D. Brad Hatch In August 2016, Dovetail conducted archaeological excavations at John Lee Pratt Park on behalf of Stafford County. During these investigations, archaeologists uncovered and excavated a...
“I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More, Down by the Riverside….”
Featured Fragment – Archaeology in Downtown Fredericksburg By Joe Blondino and Dr. Kerri Barile In January 2017, the City of Fredericksburg sponsored an archaeological dig at the site of the new Riverfront Park on Sophia Street in the downtown historic district. The...
What’s Your Point?
Featured Fragment – Arrowheads, Spear Points, and Knives By Joe Blondino When you think of Native American artifacts, one of the first things that probably come to mind are arrowheads. But did you know that most of the artifacts that people call “arrowheads” were not...
Setting the Royal Table
Featured Fragment – Queen's Ware By Kerry S. González The image to the below is a creamware plate with a rim pattern known as "Royal Shape." Creamware was also commonly referred to as "Queen’s Ware" after its creator, Josiah Wedgwood, successfully completed a...
Footsteps in the Attic
Featured Fragment – Salubria's Hidden Shoe By M. Chris Manning The slipper shown to the left was recovered from an ‘excavation’ in the attic at Salubria, a mid-eighteenth-century Georgian home in Culpeper County, Virginia. This shoe is believed to have been...
History Well-Preserved
Featured Fragment – Nineteenth-Century Pickle Bottles By Kerry González Recent excavations by Dovetail, conducted on behalf of Stafford County, recovered two cathedral-style pickle bottles (displayed below). They were located within two separate trash pits at a Civil...
Archaeological Amusement
Featured Fragment – Brandywine Springs Carousel Ring By Bill Liebeknecht In 1886, Richard Crook rented the Brandywine Springs facilities from the Fell family. Located west of downtown Wilmington, Delaware, Crook envisioned a resort where people would go on weekends...
Syphilis, Small Pox, and Scurvy! Oh My!
Featured Fragment – Riverfront Bottle By Kerry González Dovetail Cultural Resource Group recovered this hand-finished bottle from a Civil War context (shown to the left) during an excavation in October 2015. The site, 44SP0069-0001, is located in the City of...
Hugh Smith & Co. Stoneware
Featured Fragment – Stoneware Sleuthing By Joe Blondino During the summer of 2015, Dovetail conducted exploratory excavations on the grounds of Tudor Place, a historic Federal-style mansion in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The excavations focused on...
Greenfield Token
Featured Fragment – Political Puzzler By Kerry S. González During the winter of 2015 and 2016 Dovetail conducted archaeological excavations on Greenfield Plantation in Botetourt County, Virginia. Over 3,000 artifacts were recovered as part of this study, many of which...
Time For Tea
Featured Fragment – Mended Pearlware Tea Bowl By Kerry S. González Several hundreds of years before tea was being consumed in the Americas (and even Britain), it was widely consumed in Asia. European traders residing in Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth...