With the Field School near the end, we've found a handful of new artifacts and features, and we've had several groups come through and visit the site.  This page includes pictures of some of those artifacts and excavations, which we'll begin to analyze as soon as Field School ends.
	Left:  Several places on the site are covered with dense layers of coal ash that contained early twentieth century refuse like this doll's face and leg.  Click on the thumbnail to the right for a close-up of the doll.

	The Emile family lived at 917 California Street after about 1930, and today they remember much about their childhood home. One of the things they noted was that it once had a pump well or cistern, as did most homes in the near-Westside.  We placed some small test pits near the back of their home to see if we could find that well, and one of those pits uncovered a circle of bricks that is almost certainly the feature the Emiles remember.
	Right:  After finding this line of bricks around the edge of one of our test pits, we expanded a unit around the one-foot square test unit.  (Click on thumbnail for larger image).
	The artifacts in the uppermost levels date to after 1920:  the Millers lived in the home until about 1930, and the Emiles moved in and stayed into the 1980's, so the well's contents certainly came from one of the two families. The pictures below show the well as it was being uncovered:  the pictures at left are earliest, and those on the right are more recent.  Click on any of the thumbnails for a full-size image.

This week we continued to dig within the home at 915 California Street and along the earliest foundation trenches.  At right, Dan is digging just outside the foundation cut where bricks had fallen onto the ground surface.  The cellar apparently was not very deep (i.e., it was not a full basement), but it was deep enough to accommodate architectural debris discarded into it after about 1940.  The artifacts within the half-cellar (behind Dan in this picture) include mostly recent vintage artifacts, like the 1/72nd scale airplane model shown below to the far left.  However the wall fall from the early foundation excavation and early home modifications has somewhat older artifacts that date to the turn of the century:  below center shows two buttons and a small porcelain doll found around the foundation.  At far right is a close-up the small porcelain doll shown in the picture at center.

This week we opened a ten-foot trench extending out from the half-cellar about where the earliest foundation cut appears.  The picture right shows the trench's brick rubble just beneath the contemporary surface.  We should excavate this trench beneath the original foundation by the end of field school.

	The Freetown Village Day Camp visited us June 7 for site tours and a lot of sifting:  with a 60-person screening crew going through excavated soil, we dug a whole lot more than the typical day! Channel 8 also visited us and interviewed campers.

Above right and left:  Freetown campers join Brenda and A'ame at the screen for their moment of television fame.

If you're interested in seeing some of the ongoing research done by the project, go visit the new Indiana State Museum's temporary exhibit "Do You See Race in the Case?"  The exhibit uses archaeological material culture and historical research from the Near-Westside to examine the relationship between race and materialism in Indianapolis.  The exhibit, which was curated by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid (IUPUI Museum Studies), Paul Mullins (Anthropology), and Owen Dwyer (Geography), is now on display at the Canal entrance to the museum.  For more details, visit the IUPUI News Center page or email Paul Mullins.

This page last updated June 7, 2002