Historic Dig

Archaeologists doing a two-week study on Island

By WAYNE TOWNER, wtowner@newsandsentinel


PARKERSBURG — A group of professional archaeologists are conducting a two-week dig on Blennerhassett Island as part of ongoing studies of the state park’s history going back to Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett and beyond.

Jarrod Burks, director of archaeological geophysics with Ohio Valley Archaeology Inc., a private archaeology firm from Columbus, is leading the dig which ran from Monday through Thursday last week and will continue from Monday through Thursday this week.

The dig is being conducted about 300 yards south of the Blennerhassett Mansion, right behind the recently renovated Putnam-Houser House.

Jerrel Anderson of Vienna is chairman of the archaeology committee for the Blennerhassett Historical Foundation, said the foundation has been financing archaeological work on Blennerhassett Island for years. The goal for the past several years has been to determine the location and size of the formal gardens which once graced the area behind the original Blennerhassett Mansion.

“That’s with the long-term object of restoring the garden in some way for the public,” he said. “There has been some progress done in that area, but we’ve found that doing excavations is very, very expensive and very time consuming.”

Anderson has been volunteering his time this week during the dig as a member of the foundation and from a longtime personal interest in archaeology as a hobby. He has been joined by his wife, Cynthia.

Anderson hopes other people will volunteer to help with the dig. Anyone with an interest in the project can call the Blennerhassett Museum at (304) 420-4800 and have their name put on a list of potential volunteers who will be called in if needed, he said.

Improvements in technology in recent years have helped tremendously in archaeology by removing more of the randomness and guesswork, Anderson said. Equipment like magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar, such as those used by Burks, can provide much more accurate information about whether there is something under the ground to find, he said.

“That way we can cover a very wide area and look what’s under the ground... we know exactly where to dig because we know where the features are, the hot spots,” Anderson said.

The current dig is a result of findings made by Burks during sweeps of the area since 2006 as part of the formal garden study. Equipment readings showed a possible L-shaped structure about 70 feet in size buried about two feet under the ground, but historical records don’t give any indication of what it might be, Anderson said.

Determining what the structure might have been is the goal of the current dig, Burks said. It is located near what was once called the “long barn,” so it could be an outbuilding of some type but that has yet to be determined, he said.

“We thought it might be a cellar or foundation,” he said. “The goal is to just see what kind of structure it is, maybe, if it is in fact a structure and hopefully to get some objects that will help us figure out how old it is. That’s the key, the goal is really to see how old it is,” Burks said.

While technology has helped with finding the right spot, the dig itself is being done in the old-fashioned archaeological way — using hands, trowels, shovels and sifting screens. The planned dig site measures about 16 by 16 feet and will go about 20 centimeters deep.

Sections of dirt of a set size are dug out and sifted through the screens in a search for small items like pottery shards, glass and other things. Potentially important pieces are bagged, tagged and stored and will be used after the dig to create a map showing where they were found on the site as part of the analysis process.

As the dig entered its second day last Tuesday, Burks said there were some interesting finds.

“There’s a lot of burned earth, so whatever the structure was, it burned down or was affected by fire in a big way,” he said, along with bricks, pottery pieces and many nails, some of which probably post-date the Blennerhassetts but are probably still from the 19th Century.