Featured Fragment Blog
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...
Mystery Medal
Featured Fragment – Braehead Manor Medallion By Kerry S. Gonzalez Our past blog posts typically include interesting details on an artifact that we find particularly notable. However, for this post we are going to highlight an artifact that we know very little about in...
A Wooden Well in Action
Featured Fragment – The Armstrong-Rogers Well Pump By Joseph Blondino and Kerry S. Gonzalez During a data recovery at the Armstrong-Rogers site, a mid-eighteenth through late-nineteenth century domestic site in Delaware, Dovetail Cultural Resource Group excavated a...
What’s in the Attic?
Featured Fragment - Archaeology in historic Salubria's attic On August 23, 2011, 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck central Virginia with its epicenter in Louisa County. The earthquake caused massive damage to eighteenth-century Salubria, a Georgian home located in...
Dolls of many parts
Featured Fragment - Houston-LeCompt archaeological site's dolls For hundreds of years, dolls have been a staple in homes with young children. When discovered archaeologically, these playthings reveal much about the culture of those who played with them. Dolls...
Digging by the River
Featured Fragment—Riverfront Park During the summer of 2013 Dovetail conducted excavations at the Riverfront Park in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Many cultural features were identified, including a large icehouse which served the residents of Fredericksburg. While...
Within the Dirt
Featured Fragment—Archeobotanical Studies In the summer of 2014 Dovetail Cultural Resource Group conducted a Phase III excavation on a late-eighteenth century site in Fredericksburg, Virginia. While this site produced an abundance of artifacts—noteworthy on their own...
Glowing Glass Discovery
Featured Fragment—Vaseline Glass In a recent excavation Dovetail Cultural Resource group found several fragments of what is known as Vaseline glass. This glass ranges in color from yellow to green and was manufactured from the 1840s to 1940. What is interesting about...