From Humus Mold to Stout Building

As Morrison and Stone began excavating at St. John’s in 1972, they encountered structures constructed or repaired with hole-set posts. Like a fence with wooden posts, these were buildings whose walls were attached to posts whose feet were set in post holes and held in place by having dirt compacted around the post feet as the post holes were back filled. At St. John’s, they discovered that the most accurate way to dimension an earthfast building was not from archaeological drawings, but directly from the dirt. At van Sweringen’s coffee house, through tedious experiments, they learned the best way to dimension hole-set timbers. Their refined excavating techniques allowed them to diagnose the phase two van Sweringen kitchen as a side-wall reared structure and the print shop as a bent-reared structure. Morrison and Stone’s research benefited from collaboration with architectural historian Cary Carson, historian Lois Carr, and housewright John O’Rourke--O’Rourke’s construction of a seventeenth-century plantation exhibit served, in part, as experimental archaeology. The 1970s was an exciting period of archaeological discovery throughout the Chesapeake. In 1981, under the leadership of Cary Carson, these discoveries were published as “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies.”