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What's Happening :
Total number of entries: 14
Page 2 of 5
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| Date:
11/10/2008
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Guy not Gosnold: a correction
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November 10, 2008
“Guy Not Gosnold: a correction”
Many people are familiar with the early seventeenth-century engraving that depicts John Guy’s party trading with Beothuk in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland in 1612. However, some people may not be aware that, outside of Canada, this image is often presented as depicting Bartholomew Gosnold trading with Native Americans in New England in 1602.
Volume 41, number 2 of the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology includes a paper by Bill Gilbert that addresses this issue and attempts to place the image in its proper historical and historiographical context. You can read a pdf version of this paper by clicking here. Click here to find out more about the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology.
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| Date:
3/7/2008
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Exposing Wood in Structure 2, Oct. 2007
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March 7, 2008. 1:35 p.m.
Wood Samples from Cupids
During our excavations at Cupids in 2007, we recovered a number of samples of decayed wood from Structure 2 located three feet south of the dwelling house. Some of these came from a timber that appears to have been part of the north wall of the building, others were taken from the remains of a timber found inside the building and running parallel to its long axis.
Three of the best preserved samples - two from the north wall and one from inside - were taken to Peter Scott at Memorial University’s Biology Department for analysis. Dr Scott has concluded that the samples “are all spruce (Picea)”. This is the second time that Dr. Scott has analyzed wood recovered from the Cupids site. In 1996 he examined a wood sample from a post found inside the dwelling house and determined that it also was spruce.
In 1996 we recovered literally hundreds of charred coniferous needles from the fireplace inside the dwelling house that appear to have been deposited during the last fire lit in that building before it burned down in the 1660s. An analysis by Mike Deal at Memorial University’s Archaeology Unit revealed these needles to be mostly spruce along with a few fir needles.
In his first letters, written in 1610 and 1611, John Guy reports that there were spruce, fir, pine and birch trees at Cupids at that time. One of the colonists’ first tasks when they arrived was to cut a load of “trees and spars” that was shipped back to England aboard the Fleming in October 1610. In the same vessel, Guy also sent samples of the “turpentine that cometh from the fir and pine and frankincense of the spruce...”.
Over the winter of 1610/1611 the colonists experimented with making charcoal from the different types of wood available to them and in May 1611 Guy shipped back three hogsheads of this charcoal: the first made from “burch”, the second from”pine and spruce”, and the third from “firre, being the lightest wood”, says Guy, “ yet it maketh good coles, and is used by our Smith.” Palaeoethnobotanical evidence recovered to date from the Cupids site suggests that, of the four main species available to the colonists, spruce was probably the most common and appears to have been the one most often used in construction.
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| Date:
1/28/2008
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Two More Bottles from Cupids
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January 28, 2008. 11:20 a.m.
Ongoing work at the lab in Cupids has resulted in the partial reconstruction of two more seventeenth-century wine bottles (shown above). The bottle on the left measures 12cm in height and the one on the right is 12.5cm high. According to bottle specialist John Wicks, both are of a type manufactured in the late seventeenth century, between circa 1689 and 1700.
The larger of the two was recovered from the collapsed cellar pit that was originally part of the storehouse erected by John Guy’s party in 1610. The storehouse and adjoining dwelling house were destroyed by fire in the 1660s after which the pit became a convenient place to dump refuse. The smaller bottle was found inside Structure 2, a small building located just a few feet south of the cellar pit.
The presence of these bottles, along with a great deal of other physical evidence, clearly indicates that the site continued to be used long after the fire of the 1660s. The smaller bottle is the second nearly complete, late-seventeenth-century bottle to be reconstructed from inside Structure 2 (See the entry for November 30, 2007 below). During the excavation of Structure 2 in 1999 we also recovered, among many other things, a complete German-manufactured Westerwald cup dating to sometime between 1690 and 1720 inside the building (See
Cupids, Occupation on this site for a photo of the Westerwald cup). The presence of these artifacts inside Structure 2 strongly suggests that, contrary to what we had once believed, this building remained standing and in use until at least the last decade of the seventeenth century.
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