Page 47 - Maryland Historical Trust - Archaeology Colonial MD

the impressions of the coffin’s wooden planks in the mortar were visible. The skeleton was a man but there is no way to identify him. Nevertheless, as one excavator joked “we can say he was firmly footed in the Catholic Church.”
In planning this excavation, we knew that very few colonial graves had been previously ex- cavated in Maryland. This raised the questions of what type of information a grave might contain and how we could collect it. In the past, archae- ological excavations primarily focused upon the body and any grave goods, with perhaps a refer- ence as to whether they had a coffin or not. In the effort to learn as much as possible from the graves, it was crucial to develop a detailed excava- tion strategy so that we could “capture” as much evidence as possible. This ranged from the form of the grave shaft and positioning of the body within it to, the position of the hands and pres- ence or absence of a shroud. After the bones were uncovered and drawn, they were measured and recorded by Smithsonian physical anthropolo- gists to ensure that the skeletal metric data were fully collected. Almost as detailed was the effort to learn how each coffin had been built. There is very little information available about this subject except through archaeology. Therefore, a meth- odology was created involving recording all evi- dence about the organic stain of the coffin wood, the precise placement and orientation of all nails and the location of their heads. In only a few cases was there any wood preserved. In this we were aided by the prior work done by Ivor Noël Hume on the 1620s burials found at Martin’s Hundred in Virginia.24
More challenging was finding evidence of a shroud, since the cloth is unlikely to have survived. Precise recording of any straight pins was one type of potential evidence for a shroud. But the excavations revealed an even better clue. Shrouds tightly wrapped the body including the feet. Some burials had the knees close together and the foot bones still in place, as they are in a living person. In other burials, the foot bones were scattered and the knees apart. The reason gradually became ap- parent. With bodies in a shroud, the legs and feet are tightly wrapped and held close together and the grave fill surrounds them. This fill holds the legs and feet together as the body decays, and the foot bones remain in rough anatomical position. But with burial in a coffin with no shroud, there was no support and the bones would collapse and move as decay progressed, with the knees usually
figure 32
Burial 53 with the niche left in the chapel foundation for the coffin.
figure 33
Burial 45 showing the tight concentration of foot bones indicating a shroud burial.
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