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Archiver > NCSTOKES > 2000-07 > 0962939117


From: <>
Subject: [NCSTOKES] Pre-Salem North Carolina
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 23:05:17 EDT


Here is another article from the Winston-Salem Journal, Winston-Salem NC

Happy Digging
Catherine Leinbach






Pre-Salem

UNCG summer dig focuses on log cabin where people who built the town lived
By Michelle Johnson










JOURNAL REPORTER



Every summer for the past eight years, the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro has used the original town of Salem as an archeology field school.

This year, the group is digging as fast as it can on the site of the town's
first building -- a log cabin that workers lived in when they were building
the town in 1766.

The town's pottery also operated there from the mid-1800s to the turn of the
20th century, and after some hard digging the students have finally begun to
uncover what they think is the pottery's old brick kiln.

"It's like being on the scent,'' said Mo Hartley, an archaeologist at Old
Salem and the director of the field school. '`We're following the trail, and
the hounds are starting to bay. What we're looking for is the product of this
kiln,'' Hartley said.

The pottery was started in 1836 by Heinrich Schaffner and made everyday
earthenware for cooking.

Later on, he Schaffner also made colorful glazed pottery decorated with
flowers.

"Pottery is a handy marker,'' Hartley said. '`It's a way to date sites. If we
can get a handle on the kind of pottery that's in use, it's an indicator of
the period.''

Pottery is a good way to figure out how people lived, Hartley said. And some
of the potters who eventually settled in other parts of North Carolina
trained in Salem, he said. The students work in a hole about the size and
depth of a back yard swimming pool, each of them assigned to a 5 foot-by-5
foot square meticulously marked off with string.

Kris Cook and Amy McGee are trying to draw what they see in their little
square -- mostly bricks and loose rubble -- on a map.

Cook kneels on dirty knees, scraping the ground with a trowel as McGee
struggles to make something more than squiggly lumps on the page.

In another 5-by-5 square, Mike Walker chips at the brittle clay soil with a
mattock, a long-handled tool similar to a pickax.

"It's very tiring at the end of the day,'' Walker said, stopping to lean
against the wall of the pit. '`But it's really something to see it peel
away.''

The UNCG group only has another seven days to work before the hole will be
covered with plastic and the dirt pushed in over it.



Published: July 6, 2000



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