Archaeologists

PHILADELPHIA - Here's what most people see when they visit Market Square Memorial Park in Marcus Hook, a tiny patch of green squeezed between two huge refineries: Jumbo tankers and cargo vessels plying the Delaware River. Washed-up plastic bottles. And lots and lots of marine debris - thick mooring rope, rusted cable, driftwood. But when John McNally, an unemployed electrician and amateur marine archaeologist from nearby Wallingford, looks out at the river, he sees something altogether different: Marauding pirates.

He may not sport a fedora on his head or a bullwhip on his belt, but Lee Preston can be recognized by the ARKLOGIST license plate on his car. And by a book that might be tucked under his arm: “Archaeology in Howard County and Beyond: What I've learned in 40 Years about its People and Sites,” written by the man himself. Preston's opus was published last year under his full name, M. Lee Preston Jr., for the James and Anne Robinson Foundation (of the new Robinson Nature Center in Columbia)

For months in the spring and summer of 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney and his ragtag flotilla of gunboats had harassed the mighty British navy on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. But outnumbered and outgunned, Barney and his miniature fleet were bottled up in the Patuxent River with no escape and enemy forces approaching. So following orders from Washington, Barney's men scuttled the estimated 17 vessels — including his flagship, the USS Scorpion — near a place known as Pig Point.

Archaeologists in Southern Maryland say they have solved a mystery that has baffled historians since at least the 1930s. They say they have found Zekiah Fort. The fort was established in 1680 by Gov. Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, for the protection of the Piscataway people and other Maryland Indian groups that were the targets of raids by "foreign" Susquehannock and Seneca warriors from the north. Five weeks of digging this spring and summer, led by St. Mary's College of Maryland anthropologist Julia King, have turned up Indian pottery mixed with glass trade beads, arrowheads fashioned from English brass, gun parts and a silver belt hanger for an English sword.

A fist-sized chunk of clear quartz that was just a curiosity when archaeologists found it eight years ago in Baltimore's Carroll Park is now being described as a relic of West African spiritual practices among Maryland slaves.Calling it "a window to the soul," Carroll Park Foundation officials and archaeologists unveiled the rock crystal yesterday at the park's Mount Clare Mansion, where it is now on display.The discovery "shows that people did hold values that were traditionally from their native [West African]

Archaeologists in Anne Arundel County are racing to excavate the remains of a remarkable 8,000- to 10,000-year-old Indian camp before looters destroy the site.The ancient tool-making camp, located in a northern section of the county, already has been badly damaged by an unidentified looter, who dug up huge mounds of dirt over several weeks this fall.Archaeologists called the damage the worst they've ever encountered."This man [the looter] was on his way to killing the last of an extinct species, the equivalent of shooting the last bull elephant, or the last bald eagle," said R. Christopher Goodwin, a Frederick archaeologist hired to salvage what artifacts and information remain buried at the camp.

After all these centuries of calumny, the Philistines are finally having some good things said about them. They were not, it seems, deserving of that withering epithet: Philistine.Archaeologists are uncovering increasing evidence that the Philistines, arch foes of the Israelites in biblical times whose name became synonymous with barbarity and boorishness, were actually creators of fine pottery and grand architecture, clever urban planners and cosmopolitan devotees of the grape. If anything, the Israelites, at the time mostly shepherds and farmers in the hills, were the less-sophisticated and less-cultured folk.

DOMENIGONI VALLEY, Calif. -- John Foster stood at the site of the 19th-century homestead of Angelo Domenigoni, the Italian-Swiss namesake of this scenic hollow destined to become Southern California's largest reservoir.Nearby, a half-dozen people dug into ground where Angelo's outhouse once stood."Most privies had about a 10-year life, at the end of which they were filled with trash," Mr. Foster, an archaeologist, said. "By looking at that, we can tell what people ate and drank, what medicines they took, all kinds of personal things about their lives."

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has said that after bombing Iraq unremittingly for five weeks it could see no damage to any of the archaeological, cultural or religious sites that bejewel the cities and riverine delta widely regarded as the birthplace of modern civilization.But archaeologists and scholars of the ancient Middle East are skeptical that all of the often-rickety structures and priceless artifacts -- some over 5,000 years old -- will emerge unscathed from the relentless pounding of ground around them -- especially in or near the northern Mesopotamian cities of Samarra and Mosul, where intensive bombing has occurred, and the capital, Baghdad.

Two sailors from a British warship barged into the home of Mark Cordea, a French-born merchant in St. Mary's City, brandishing cabbages they had stolen earlier from a neighbor's garden.Cordea's servant was there, but reported later he was too weak from an illness to stop them from "boiling the said cabbages and some meat at their pleasure."The sailors escaped, but their culinary crime 311 years ago was reported to the local authorities, and the complaint was preserved in the Maryland colony's archives.

Local archaeologists have not only confirmed that Baltimore's Lafayette Square Park was once the stomping ground of a Civil War army barracks, but they also dug up a little-known fact about the soldiers who dwelled there: They had a knack for losing buttons. On Sunday, volunteers who joined the Baltimore Heritage and Archaeological Society of Maryland in searching for remnants at the former Union army encampment ended a three-day quest of exploring the park's history in the 19th century.

Volunteer archaeologists are descending on leafy Lafayette Square in West Baltimore this weekend in an effort to uncover relics from Camp Hoffman, a Union army encampment that stood there during the Civil War. Just hours into the project Friday, while dodging rain showers and swarms of June bugs, the diggers had already turned up fragments of mid-19th-century tableware and decorative wrought iron, nails, birdshot and even a piece of an old pocket...

When James Holliday, an African-American who was born a slave but died an Annapolis homeowner, gathered for meals with his family in their brick home just off State Circle in the late 19th century, they dined on fine dishware — each plate with its own ornate pattern or crisp white finish. With what was then considered a prestigious job as a messenger for the superintendent at the U.S. Naval Academy, Holliday could afford to buy his family fancy plates in accordance with Victorian etiquette as relayed in books and newspapers.

For months in the spring and summer of 1814, Commodore Joshua Barney and his ragtag flotilla of gunboats had harassed the mighty British navy on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. But outnumbered and outgunned, Barney and his miniature fleet were bottled up in the Patuxent River with no escape and enemy forces approaching. So following orders from Washington, Barney's men scuttled the estimated 17 vessels — including his flagship, the USS Scorpion — near a place known as Pig Point.

Once, this was a stout ship, with oak futtocks and floor timbers, fastened with iron nails, built with saw and adz and the calloused hands of shipwrights now long dead. Two centuries ago it was a simple coaster, hauling goods around the eastern capes, armed against pirates, and ending its days at a wharf in New York City. As the years went by, it sank into the harbor mud, entombed beneath what would one day become the World Trade Center site. Shortly after noon Monday, two trucks bearing the ship's unearthed skeleton pulled into a Maryland science complex on the shore of the Patuxent River in St. Leonard's, where scores of eager archaeologists and curators waited as if for the bones of a dinosaur.

An Anne Arundel County judge refused Wednesday to give the killer of a woman who had befriended him a second chance to serve part of his sentence out of prison, saying that Christopher Perkins O'Brien was behind bars because he did not heed conditions of his previous release. O'Brien asked to be let out early because he has been assaulted and threatened behind bars, and has finished counseling programs. But leaving prison this week would have had him out just six months ahead of his expected mandatory release in May; a parole hearing this month also could lead to early freedom.

A Revolutionary War-era house in Fells Point where the first known synagogue in Maryland met in 1830-1832 has yielded unexpectedly rich deposits of historical artifacts, according to two archaeologists involved in the dig.Privies in the house and on a side lot at Fleet and Bond streets became time capsules near the center of the thriving 18th-century seaport that merged with other towns to form Baltimore.Since May, excavators have uncovered no artifacts from the synagogue but have come across thousands of china cups and plates, wine bottles, pitchers, beer mugs, coins and other items from the late 1700s, the early to mid-1800s and the late 1800s.

WYOMING, Pa. - Two field archaeologists crouched in trenches in an old cornfield near the Eighth Street Bridge and scraped the earth with their trowels, looking for evidence of American Indians who may have been in the area. The archaeologists tested the area to see if the site could be included in the National Register of Historic Places. The testing must be done before the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation can use the land to build a new bridge. The preliminary testing is a "baby version of a dig," said archaeologist Jamie McIntyre.

Age: 39 Salary: $85,000 Years on the job: 2 1/2 How she got started: : Growing up in Minnesota, Julie Schablitsky first became interested in archaeology at the age of seven when she discovered fossils in the limestone of her gravel driveway. She went on her first dig at the age of 15 and at the age of 18 began working as an archaeologist in the Midwest for the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service during the summers. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in anthropology and a master's degree from Oregon State University in anthropology.

Parts of Charles County's Zekiah Swamp are every bit as inhospitable as the name suggests, choked with tick-infested woods and boot-sucking wetlands. But as archaeologists are discovering to their delight, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries Zekiah was a growth center for the young Maryland colony. The site of a 1674 courthouse was found last summer. Excavations this month have uncovered what might be traces of the "summer house" that Gov. Charles Calvert built to dodge his political enemies.