The London Town site was so rich that it has yielded more than 2 million artifacts. Luckenbach and staff, supported by the Anne Arundel County Preservation Trust, have chronicled each one, storing them on site and at the project's offices in Annapolis.
Last week, interns were busy bagging and labeling shards in the new laboratory behind the modern visitors center.
Like a blurry film coming into focus, a long-lost way of life has taken shape and continues to develop.
Grow says the bucket of stuff she grabs from a shelf and sifts through is typical of what guests might find. When they sift through dirt with archaeologists' screens next week, they'll very likely find something in each scoop - shards of pipes, nails, bits of pottery or porcelain, oyster shells. Each tells a story.
Take the 2-inch grayish cylinder Grow holds in the light and rolls between her fingers. It's part of a pipe stem
Whether it was the proliferation of tobacco, the crop's unchallenged economic status during the Colonial period or a general ignorance of science, just about everyone smoked pipes, including children.
"No one lived long enough to get cancer, so they didn't know about that problem," Grow says, adding that the "bore" of the stem - the width of the hole through the center - helps establish where and when the pipe was made.
In an era when "doctoring" involved applying leeches, many told their children that smoking tobacco could cure a cough.
A bent nail prompts a disquisition on building practices and living conditions of the time. Though modern Americans might see the stately Georgian mansion as the quintessential Colonial structure, those places were only for the rich.
That image endures, in part, because those brick structures have lasted. Truth be told, most London Towners lived in tiny, hastily made wooden houses. These were earth-fast (lacking a permanent foundation), usually no bigger than 20 feet by 20 feet in size, and as often as not, each was home to more than a dozen people.
The project's assistant director, C. Jane Cox, says that because immigrants from big, abundantly paved cities like London, England, knew little of the potency of rural termites, the earliest builders had no idea most of the places would collapse in less than 25 years.
"The facts of life in Maryland were kind of a rude awakening," Cox said.
