My Trip To The Rebecca Nurse Homestead Dig

My Trip to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead Dig

It was a Saturday in the summer, July 12, 2008 to be exact. I was excited because today was the day the Phillips Academy Summer Session was taking our class to a dig site. The dig site was not that far away. It happened to be in Danvers, which used to be part of Salem. The site was named after a famous girl from a long time ago. Actually, she was accused of being a witch. She was found innocent by the trial, but was hung anyway. She was baptized February 21, 1621. She was the daughter of William Towne.

At the dig, I had a lot of fun. Archaeologists dig in 1 meter by 1 meter squares, so that’s what we did. We dug right outside the front door of the house that Rebecca Nurse might have lived in. We believe that the owners of the house did not have trash, so they just threw the trash out the front door, and archaeologists love to dig through other people’s trash. They also know that the house and yard and barn and all were on Native American’s land so there might be some projectile points, too.

When we started the dig, it was really tough, because we had to dig through all the grasses roots. We started out by finding a coin. The coin was from 2001. We also found fairly recent nails from the 2000’s, too. Then when we got a couple of centimeters deeper, we found a coin dated to 1963. We kept on finding nails, still. The next couple of centimeters help some huge worms and some more nails.

Then, one of my classmates hit a really important discovery, a Native American coin. These coins were not produced after 1908. We had hit the jackpot. We were in the late 1800’s. We started finding very important artifacts. We found a clay marble, some 6 or 7 bullets; these were diagnostics, a gold chain, and a piece of a cast-iron stove. We had a very successful day and I can’t wait until I can go back there next Saturday.