Then, as now, they were free to the public.
Some Dig Days, officials say, have attracted as many as 190 people, including wannabe excavators from up and down the East Coast. Most draw in the neighborhood of 70, including elementary schoolchildren, retirees and every age in between.
London Town is one of three active sites that make up the Lost Towns Project, a nonprofit archaeological enterprise begun in the early 1990s by Al Luckenbach, official archaeologist for Anne Arundel County and heavily supported by the county government. The others are the Colonial-era Samuel Chew mansion, discovered near Deale two years ago after years of searching, and Pig Point, a site on Jug Bay near the county's southern tip. (Pig Point made news just last week when staffers found the oldest human structure ever detected in Maryland.)
Luckenbach's staff of eight and teams of volunteers are also searching for a prime county site at which to study the Middle Woodland period (about 200-500 A.D.).
But London Town, where the public will dig, listen to lectures and be able to interact with staff next weekend, has proved especially rich.
When his crew started excavating in the neighborhood in 1994, Luckenbach knew the old port was nearby, but he had no idea so much of it lay in the 23-acre park itself. Over the past 15 years, as they've sifted through much of the county-owned land in 5-foot-by-5-foot sections, Luckenbach and company have been able to map it out in detail, and a portrait of life in the "lost town" has emerged.
Historians knew some salient facts. Maryland's Colonial government, needing a place from which to ship tobacco, founded the site as an official port in 1683. Its status grew, drawing craftsmen, seafarers, innkeepers and more.
"Nothing was here before," says Grow. "But this was a strategic site. The South River was like I-95."
The town thrived until just before the Revolutionary War, when the Maryland government - in order, some say, to foster the growth of Annapolis - moved the tobacco taxing station elsewhere. By 1780, London Town was virtually gone.
What was not known was the warp and woof of life in the town. That was left to archaeologists, the men and women whose job is part physical (digging, sifting with screens, sorting, storing), part narrative (assembling from the artifacts an ever-richer, more-accurate tale of the life lived by those who used the stuff).
