Field Session 2008

The first year’s effort demonstrated that the Claggett site is a single component Mason Island site, the only such site known in Maryland. Single component sites are highly valuable because the materials and features all represent one moment in time; are not intermixed with other time periods. This highly significant site can fill a huge gap in our knowledge of this Late Woodland culture, including examination of what are thought to be individual family habitation areas from the Late Woodland period.

To begin, only the general location of the Claggett Retreat site was known to us before the field session. In early May, Maryland Historical Trust archeologists and I spent a day excavating shovel test pits in an effort to locate the site’s exact boundaries. Ample amounts of Mason Island ceramics and lithic material were encountered slightly northwest of where we ultimately concentrated our excavations. We started at that location for the first couple of days and were recovering artifacts, but not in great quantity.

This brings us to the Calvin Swomley story. Swomley had located and excavated at Claggett Retreat in 1964. There, however, had been little contact with him since the late 1970s. In the heat of one lunch break, two ASM members, Antonella Bassani and Alex McPhail, decided this would not do. They quickly initiated a missing person search in nearby Buckeystown, determined that Swomley still lived in the area and showed up on his doorstep.

To make a long story short, Swomley was enlisted to visit the site. In a now-famous phone call from Antonella at the top of the hill to excavators in the field, we were graciously informed that we were digging in the wrong place. Swomley walked the field with us all, bringing along his original 1964 map of the 28 features he had investigated. By close of business that day, we shifted our excavations to the southeast about 100 yards. Hey, it’s not a perfect science.

With renewed vigor we opened many more new units and two long trenches. The latter were efforts to locate any palisade that may have been present. What did we discover? A large buried water pipe that ran the length of one of the trenches. We also discovered that the site appears very different from either Winslow or Hughes, the last two prehistoric sites ASM has investigated. At this point I would have to argue it is more of a small, dispersed settlement than a more nucleated village like Winslow and Hughes.

It appeared to me that known features were focused in three or four clusters that possibly could represent house sites scattered across the site. This would be consistent with a dispersed community. Artifact densities are substantial, but less than at many other village sites. It stands to reason that three to five families would leave behind less debris than a whole nucleated village. In the same sense, features and postmolds are sparse. Some may find this disheartening, but I now see Claggett Retreat as a new and very interesting type of site, a unique artifact of the earliest phase of the introduction of agriculture and more settled life in the region. And a kind of site that has not yet been investigated.

Founded at least as early as the 1720s, this quiet little village once was a bustling port town filled with shops and dwellings and warehouses. But the town's life-blood, the navigable Port Tobacco River, soon filled with silt from the eroding lands of neighboring farms. The town declined throughout the 1800s, giving up its status as the County seat in the 1890s to the newly created town of La Plata. Despite economic misfortune and devastating hurricanes, some residents remained and their descendants, joined by some newcomers, have kept this community alive.

The Port Tobacco Archaeological Project began in August 2007. A small but merry band of professional archaeologists were quickly augmented by an equally merry band of volunteers as we set out to discover the archaeological deposits of an entire town. Port Tobacco's origins stretch back to the early 1600s but it was not until the early 1700s that it became the port town for which it is known. Before the arrival of European settlers, Native Americans inhabited the area and local legend says that a village was once located within the current town limits.

We began our work in the south end of "downtown" Port Tobacco. Shovel test pits were excavated at 25-ft intervals with the goal of identifying the locations of remnant building foundations, roads, trash deposits, and anything else no longer visible on the surface. The heat and drought made the digging difficult but we were rewarded with artifacts in every one of our test pits.

Using the late 1800s maps of the town, we could correlate some of the deposits to known buildings and property owners. But, our finds were not limited to the 1800s. We recovered material from the 1700s and Native American artifacts that are hundreds to thousands of years old. Our excavations continued into early December and in that time we excavated 400 shovel test pits and recovered over 25,000 artifacts.

The archaeology of Port Tobacco is unusually rich. The reason for this is the same reason for the town's demise. Soil erosion brought sediment into the Port Tobacco River at such a rate as to choke off the port. The town's economy could not recover from this loss and the relocation of the County courthouse to La Plata. People left Port Tobacco as the sediment that filled the river blanketed the town, preserving it for archaeologists of the future. With little new development, these deposits remained undisturbed. What we have at Port Tobacco we have because of the town’s demise.

Our main goal is to recover the history of Port Tobacco, from Native American occupation right up to the present time. We are working with the Society for the Restoration of Port Tobacco, which has already reconstructed the 1800s courthouse and restored one of the three remaining 1700s houses. More reconstructions are planned, as are interpretive displays and trails.

The field session at Port Tobacco will include the excavation of units near the Port Tobacco town square. Here we have intact deposits from a residence, a store, and a hotel. We will also explore areas that produced concentrations of prehistoric artifacts, and attempt to locate and study all deposits relating to the historic jailhouse.

For more information on the Port Tobacco Archaeological Project, visit our blog at http://porttobacco.blogspot.com. For more on the restoration efforts at Port Tobacco, visit the Society for the Restoration of Port Tobacco’s website at http://restoreporttobacco.org.