Excavations--Test Trench--Excavation Unit North 21 West 80.5

The northernmost unit in the test trench excavated during the 1996 season, it presented the least complex stratigraphy, and the excavation team found the unit’s history fairly easy to interpret.

Beneath the sod and topsoil of the present garden, we first encountered three layers of fill reaching to a depth of 0.75 feet below the surface. The soils and the coal, brick fragments, oyster shells, nails, and ceramic and glass sherds told us that these layers represented gardening activities of Couper family members in the early 20th-century or the Lairds a few decades later. Another 0.75 feet of mixed fills below these dated to the Coupers’ mid-19^th-century installation of the terraced formal garden. These fills buried even earlier ones, brought from elsewhere in the city in the years after 1805. They document an effort to reshape the landscape following Benjamin Henry LaTrobe’s plan to re-engineer the city’ topography. LaTrobe’s plan called for filling "gullies" like that in which the Read houses stood; the "hills" surrounding them would provide the soils, and the result would be a more level, better drained urban landscape. In the process, the Reads added at least 0.5 feet of fill in this part of the property, and more in the front, closer to the river. The artifacts from these layers tell us that they indeed came from the backyard trash middens of other New Castle lots. We found the greatest number and largest fragments of charcoal, brick, building stone, oyster shells, nails, tobacco pipes, glass, and ceramics in this deposit.

The early 19^th-century fill sealed a thin layer of soil that accumulated in the Reads’ backyard in the late 18^th century, during the years that they rebuilt the house, added outbuildings to the property, and redesigned its landscape to meet their needs. Earlier residents of the house left little evidence of their presence this far back in the yard, with the exception of those who first developed the lot. The deepest cultural layer, reaching to almost 3 feet below the present surface, consists of a clayey fill dumped in the "gully" in the hopes of elevating the land above flood levels. As the Dutch builders redistributed the soils of New Amstel, they dug into the remains of earlier native Delawarean settlements. The last artifacts we found in this unit were two broken stone tools and flakes of stone left over from toolmaking.

QuickTime Movies from the excavations!

• North 21 West 80.5 Duration: 18 seconds Size: 732KB
  
• Wet Screening Duration: 11.2 seconds Size: 442KB

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