Our very own volunteers Bob and Vera Wiest are the recipients of the 2022 Chesapeake Crossroads Heritage Stewardship Award! This award recognizes “efforts that make a difference in stewardship of our natural resources or built environment.”
This married couple of archaeological all-stars process artifact collections by washing, labeling, and preparing artifacts for curation. Whether it’s a 10,000-year-old spear point or a piece of pottery from the 1800s, we know we can count on Bob and Vera to get the job done with care and dedication. Over the last two years, Bob and Vera have given over 550(!) combined hours towards preserving local history! We truly could not do what we do without the generosity of incredible volunteers like Bob and Vera–Congratulations on this well-deserved award!
As part of Native American Heritage Month, a new exhibit is up at the Glen Burnie Regional Library! Titled “We Are Still Here,” it is an introduction to the stories of Maryland’s indigenous people from prehistory to the present.
From left to right: Drew Webster, Mary Jane Williams, Lorelei Bidwell, Emily Lucie
The exhibit was a collaboration between Anne Arundel County Cultural Resources Section, The Lost Towns Project, and the Glen Burnie Library. Archaeologist Drew Webster and archaeology intern Emily Lucie teamed up with librarians Mary Jane Williams and Lorelei Bidwell to create and install the exhibit, along with Dr. Ashley Minner, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, who contributed her research about the vibrant Lumbee Community in Baltimore City.
Want to check it out? Visit the Glen Burnie library at 1010 Eastway in November or December of this year.
Lab Director Jenn Babiarz with Jamie and Ernie Joyner
Skipworth’s Addition is a highly significant 17th-century archaeological site near Galesville in Anne Arundel County. It was the home of George and Elizabeth Skipworth (also Skipwith/Skipwirth) from 1664 to 1682. The Skipworths were early settlers to the area and were influential figures in the local Quaker community.
Recently, the Anne Arundel County Archaeology Lab hosted Jamie Beane Joyner, George Skipworth’s 8th great granddaughter, along with her husband Ernie and daughter Bliss. Lab Director Jenn Babiarz showed off some of the archaeological collections from Skipworth’s Addition to the Joyners, who visited all the way from Mississippi!
You can read more about the archaeology at Skipworth’s Addition here.
African American Voices, Memories and Places: A Four Rivers Heritage Trail
This virtual trail and its companion guide highlight publicly accessible historic sites that provide a tangible place to visit, explore, and contemplate important African American individuals, families, people, historic places, events, struggles, and accomplishments. It also included many privately-owned sites, and in far too many cases, sites physically lost to time. This interactive tour acknowledges and celebrates contributions by African-Americans over the County’s 370-year history; those who tilled the soil on farms that made Anne Arundel County prosper prior to Emancipation, those who harvested, processed and shipped the Bay’s seafood to feed an expanding Country, and those who physically built the grand colonial houses for wealthy landowners, many of whom were enslaved. We honor those families and individuals that came together in good times and bad, to start a church and a congregation, to found a school, to build a community, and to create a legacy.
Please note that many of the tour stops are privately owned and not accessible for visitation. Thank you for respecting the privacy of these properties. Sites open to the public are clearly marked.
Explore the Civil Rights Era in Anne Arundel County, Maryland
Relying upon more than 50 oral histories, this virtual tour is a rare opportunity to hear about local history through the eyes, voices, and memories of those who experienced it first-hand. Highlighting local places, residents, and their stories, the project offers accounts of everyday activities during a time of segregation. It documents spaces of leisure and recreation, where people of color could gather and enjoy solidarity and empowerment; places like stores, ballfields, beaches, juke joints, movie theaters, beauty salons, and barber shops. A team of historians, led by Lyndra Marshall (née Pratt) and Dr. John Kille worked with citizens who generously shared their memories of what life was like during segregation, and uncovered compelling stories of injustice, resistance, and sacrifice, as well as perseverance and triumph. The full interviews and transcriptions are accessible by request from the Maryland State Archives.
We asked Catonsville High School senior and 2022 intern Abby Shackelford. Here is what she had to say:
I first discovered the Lost Towns Project in a Maryland Archaeology Month pamphlet I picked up while on a college tour at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Originally, I had hoped to find something closer to home, but as I looked through the pamphlet, I realized that Anne Arundel County was as close as I was going to get. I applied for the internship because I wanted to make sure that I liked archaeology and got some experience with it before I chose to pursue it in college.
I really enjoyed our field trips to all of the different sites. It was cool to see how they varied in upkeep and the difficulties that the different environments caused while executing field work. I also enjoyed the trip to the Prince George’s County Archaeology Lab because it was interesting to see the difference in collections storage from county to county, and it was cool to see how other people did their processing and cataloging procedures outside of our tiny sphere at the London Town Lab. I liked how we had an equal balance of lab days and field days. It was good to have some variety, and I really enjoyed all of the field trips to all sorts of cool historical sites I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about. Conversely, it was also nice to have the lab days after weeks out in the field, sweating in the heat. Some days you just needed to sit and mindlessly clean some brick with a toothbrush while you soaked up some AC.
Altogether, besides miscellaneous lab work, I worked on two major field projects. One was at Kinder Farm, while one was at Arden. Kinder Farm Park, an Anne Arundel County park, was formerly the site of the Kinder family farm. The Kinders were German immigrants and truck farmers, growing produce and transporting it to larger centers of commerce for sale. We dug multiple shovel test pits (STPs) around the locations of two of the major farmhouses and other various outbuildings, finding a variety of artifacts, mostly from the early 20th century.
Our other major field project was on a private property—a former plantation known as Arden, built in the 1840s. Arden was home to Dr. James Murray, a slaveholder, who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War as a surgeon. We excavated in the woods near the main house, around and in the foundation of a former tenant house, where a man we know only by oral retelling as “Uncle Wec,” reportedly a former slave on the plantation, lived up until the 1940s. We collected surface finds, dug STPs around the remains of the foundation, and excavated a unit in the corner of the house. Most of the artifacts we found likely dated to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A memorable moment would be when I dropped my phone in poison ivy. The worst part was that we weren’t even in the field! I dropped it off of the deck by the waterfront and it managed to land face down on the one patch of poison ivy in the whole garden (but luckily it missed the storm drain which was mere inches away). Before this internship, I had no idea what poison ivy looked like. I knew it had three leaves and it was shiny, but I didn’t know its exact appearance. I can now confidently say I know what it looks like. It just took dropping my phone in it and getting a little bit of it on my hand for me to figure it out.
I would definitely recommend this internship to other students. For another high school student, I think this internship could also be helpful to help them determine whether or not they want to continue with archaeology as a career path, since it was composed of a wide array of everyday archaeological tasks. My main takeaway from this internship would have to be that I learned methods of archaeology—I gained experience in different techniques used to clean, label, and excavate artifacts, among other things. I think I can also claim to know the layout of the lab pretty well, after all of the cleaning and organizing we did of it. Coming away from this internship, I can now say that I have more of an idea of what I am getting into if I choose to pursue archaeology as a profession. The hands-on experience that this internship has afforded me has been invaluable. I have had opportunities in the archaeology world that I would not have otherwise had if not for this internship, such as the opportunity to observe ground-penetrating radar, help organize and store collections, and go on “behind the scenes” tours of museums like the Mt. Calvert House and the exhibits at London Town. I am also doubly as grateful to have these opportunities as a high schooler who had no prior experience with archaeology coming in to the internship. Having completed this internship has also hopefully given me a leg up in the college application process, which is fast approaching for me, as it is yet another extracurricular to add to my application. This internship has been an experience that not many high schoolers often get.
Overall, this internship was a very great experience for me. I was very lucky to get the opportunity to do it, and I had a lot of fun this summer. This internship has only solidified my desire to continue to do archaeology. I am planning to continue volunteering at the lab every now and then during the upcoming school year. I look forward to being able to expand my knowledge of history and archaeology.
