Notes from the Trenches at Nombre de Dios: Week 3!

Dr. Kathleen Deagan is back for a 3rd installment of Notes from the Trenches at Nombre de Dios!

Flagler College students help out on the dig!

The second week of work at the Mission and Shrine has sped by, with no rain! Thanks again to the Sons of Our Lady and the volunteers from Flagler College and the St. AugustineArchaeological Association, we have now uncovered almost the entire building - the coquina section is in excellent condition, with wide (50 centimeters) shell and rubble footings, and in some places there are traces of the bottom course of the coquina stone walls. Herschel Shepard, the architect who is advising us, tells us that the foundation width could have supported two-story walls.  

Sons of Our Lady moving dirt!

The western portion of the building is a different story.  There the wall footings are narrow trenches (about 25 cm. wide) packed with oyster shells.  Some have a layer of mortar on the top, but no sections of the walls themselves are left .  The footings are very fragile and prone to crumbling, so excavating around them is a balancing act.  In some places, adjacent to the wall footings, there are thin patches of shell and mortar.  We originally thought that these were remnants of tabby walls that fell down.  But there is not enough of this material to account for tabby walls, and there are a lot of coquina chunks around the footings, which is making us re-think the assumption that this section was all constructed of tabby.....

Rubble or wall fall.

These buildings were "blown up with gunpowder" by the Spaniards themselves in 1728. The English raider John Palmer, like James Moore in 1702, had captured and occupied the Mission buildings that year. He severely damaged them before he retreated. The Governor was not going to let that happen again. They salvaged the coquina blocks to rebuild the Mission to the south, across what is today called Hospital Creek and was then called Macaris Creek. 

Pipes in footing.

And as if that destruction was not enough, 20th century workmen laid irrigation lines, iron water lines and electrical conduits through the buried footings. They obviously did not know they were there, but we imagine that they had choice words about the difficult digging! Fortunately, all the disturbance and damage from the 18^th to the 20^th century has not eliminated the essential archaeological evidence we need to understand the building and its meaning.

Uncovering stone foundations.

Members of the Sons of Our Lady have uncovered much of the wall we mentioned last week, that extends out from the stone building toward the east. After about 5 meters, it seems to turn to the south, so we will continue trying to understand if it is earlier, later, or contemporary in relation to the stone portion of the building. 

So far nothing in either the excavations or the ongoing documentary work that Dr. Tim Johnson is doing has challenged our hypothesis that the eastern, coquina section of the building was the Shrine built by the Governor in 1677, and that the western, potentially tabby section, was added- probably after Moore's raid of 1702. We have recovered San Augustín Blue on White majolica, Castillo Polychrome and PueblaPolychrome majolica, and there is a lot of San Marcos pottery, associated with the Guale and Yamasee Indians who moved close to St. Augustine after about 1600. 

And the first bead was found on Saturday! Turquoise blue, drawn and facetted glass.  So far, nothing dates to later than the period of ca. 1650-1730.  

FPAN at kick off event.

Text and images: Kathleen Deagan

Miss last week's update? All Notes from the Trenches at Nombre de Dios:

Week 1

Week 2
Week 4/5

And for an illustrated look at Moore's 1702 Raid click to read more.

Check back next week for another update from Dr. Deagan. And thanks again to the project sponsors and partners for making the dig possible!