Page 45 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

foundation could easily support a new structure. Other clues included specially made window bricks, window glass panes cut in diamond shapes, locally-made flat roof tiles, and plastered walls. Significantly, very little of the plaster had lathe marks on the reverse side. Instead, brick traces were observed on many fragments, meaning the interior brick walls were plastered. The near ab- sence of lathe marks means the ceiling could not have been plastered. Instead, a scatter of wrought nails in the central area of the building suggests that a wooden barrel vault finished the ceiling, as is observed on the vast majority of period churches evaluated. Internally, excavators uncovered a dense complex of burials in the center of the church. However, these all stopped in a line in the east- ern portion of the building, implying some type of a barrier once existed there. This is the location predicted by Catholic Church architecture for a wooden platform that covered the altar area or chancel and supported an altar rail. The massive brick foundation also provided a clue. Renaissance architects such as Palladio described a relationship between a foundation and the height of the walls it was meant to support. The depth was to be one sixth of the height. Examples of period buildings were collected to test this relationship and there is a strong correlation. This evidence suggested that the full chapel brickwork measured 30 feet with the above ground walls rising 25 feet above the land surface to where the roof would begin. Such a correlation is not surprising because there is a sig- nificant cost to the foundation work and it seems unlikely that resources would have been wasted on an unnecessarily deep foundation. This and other aspects of the chapel plan imply that the designers or builders had some knowledge of classical archi-
tecture principles.
All this architectural evidence obtained from
the excavations was compiled, examples of period Jesuit churches elsewhere in the world collected, and analysis of the chapel architecture conducted with the assistance of architects John Mesick and Jeffrey Baker, who specialize in historic structures. This resulted in a reconstruction plan and the museum was able to rebuild this important structure in the first decade of the 21st century.22
The excavations and two geophysical surveys found abundant evidence for burials within and all around the chapel. Physical examination of the surfaces of these graves yielded valuable infor- mation to date them. Specifically, the content of the grave fill and their orientations varied. Some
had quantities of demolition debris such as brick, mortar and plaster fragments in the fill, indicat- ing they must have been interred during or after the church was torn down. Many of the graves lacked such debris although they did contain a few brick fragments. These also tended to have the same general orientation as the walls of the Brick Chapel, suggesting they dated to the period it stood (ca. 1668–ca. 1715).
But other graves lacked brick fragments or other rubble and tended to be at different angles. Most significantly, a number of these were cut through when workers dug the foundation trench. They had to have been present before con- struction began in the mid-1660s. Such graves must be the earliest, either associated with the first chapel or dating to the period between 1645 and the early 1660s. Thus, observations about artifact content and alignment allowed the graves to be put into three temporal phases, demonstrat- ing how important careful observation and open- ness to the evidence despite theoretical assump- tions is for archaeological research. At this point, none of the graves had been excavated and it was the long rectangular shape of these features that suggested they were human graves. But had the remains of any of the people buried here survived over three centuries in the ground? Only excava- tion could answer that.
Disturbing human graves is a serious busi- ness and not normally undertaken unless the graves are endangered through construction or shoreline erosion. Neither was the case for the chapel. However, in planning to reconstruct the building on the original site, it was likely that foundation work might be needed and scaffold- ing holes, drains and other activities would very probably damage the graves. Therefore, a plan was developed to dig all the features that lay within a 10 foot zone around the outside of the chapel. Once all the intrusions had been carefully dug and recorded, chapel reconstruction work could proceed without fear of harming any of the buri- als or archaeological evidence. We obtained per- mission and this project was conducted under the supervision of Timothy Riordan. All human remains uncovered were taken for analysis by Douglas Owsley at the Smithsonian Institution.
As the excavations began, human remains were soon encountered and they were generally in excellent condition. The chapel rests upon a thick sand and gravel deposit which creates good drainage. As a result, the bones tended to still be
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