December, 4th 2007 Privy Dig
Today's dig is in Wilmington Delaware. I planned to meet up with Doug and Matt around 7:30ish and then we would scout around town and try to find something to dig. Then Alan and George were going to meet up with us around 9:30. After driving around town for about an hour and not finding anything to dig in the pontil age section of town we decided to head over to the east side to dig some 1870s-80s pits. We drove around that section of town looking for a couple of houses to dig. We were hoping that sense we had 5 diggers we could do two pits at the same time. About the time Alan showed up we found a couple pits to do. Then George arrived about 20 minutes later. I quickly probed out two pits in the two back yards and we got to work. They were small round brickliners about 3 feet across. The first pit was dug by Alan, Matt, and Doug while George and I worked on the pit in the yard next door. Both pits produced about a bucket of bottles from the 1870-1900 era including a couple smooth based squats and several local pharmacy bottles and quite a few marbles and pipes. These two pits went about 8 feet deep and we had them both finished in about 4 hours. With a few hours of daylight still left we decided to tackle one more pit. This pit probed very ashy and soft so we thought easy digging however it was full of thick roots that we had to cut through and this really slowed down the pace of digging. At about 6 feet we started finding some 1920s junk food jars. We were hoping this pit would age but it never did it bottomed out at about 12 feet deep. We quickly filled this one in and headed over to the west side of town to our meeting place to split up our finds and head home. This was about 8:00 by time we finished the split.
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