It’s often joked in archaeology that all they do is study garbage, and a recent rare find at Jamestown, Virginia is no exception. While the scientists were excavating a 400-year-old cellar—which, like others in the area, had been filled in with trash after the building above it became unsuitable for use—they came upon a mysterious metal object.
As scientifically described by conservator and curator Katharine Corneli, the artifact looks like a “semi-circle with a squiggly line in it,” according to WY Daily.
Jamestown Rediscovery team was stumped; they had never seen something quite like it.
The artifact was too fragile to be directly extracted from the cellar, and so it was brought up with the soil underneath it, which acted as a support matrix for the item until it could reach a lab for study. It was there that they finally figured out what this rare modern-day find was: What was probably an extremely common household item in colonial times, a cooking grill.
It now appears that the archaeologists uncovered half of an iron grill, which would have been used on a daily basis for cooking and baking, both directly on the grill and in pots—a notion supported by appropriately-shaped cooking marks on a pot fragment discovered in 2009. Though the current grill seems flat, Corneli believes it may have once had little legs that held it up over a fire.
An example of what the grill could have looked like. Credit: Jamestown Rediscovery Project
But why is a common item so rare?
There are currently several theories about why so few of these grills have been found. The leading theory is that these iron grills were both quite useful and durable, meaning that they were rarely thrown away (unlike the one found in the cellar).
And even if a grill did break, the colonists could easily have repurposed the metal instead of chucking out the entire thing, meaning that more grills may have actually been found onsite—just in utterly unrecognizable forms.
Either way, the grill is now undergoing the standard rigorous cleaning and conservation processes for metal artifacts in the lab, while the archaeologists keep a sharp eye out for more grill fragments in the field.
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Image credit: Elizabeth Hornsby/WYDaily
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