Re: Latest on Newport Tower dig

On 25 Nov 2006 17:30:43 -0800, "nadia" <nadiasbenz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Nov 25, 1:42 am, Doug Weller <dwel...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
http://www.turnto10.com/news/10392157/detail.html
An archaeological dig at a mysterious Newport Tower turns up -- not much.

So, still no archaeological evidence that it is any earlier than the 17th
century.

Doug
--
Doug,
I found another newspaper article at the Newport Daily News from
November 24th. It is more informative than the short article that you
just posted. Very interesting.

www.newportdailynews.com/articles/2006/11/24/news/news4.txt

"Touro Park dig comes up empty

By Sean Flynn/Daily News staff
November 24th
NEWPORT - If Nordic Vikings, Scottish Knight Templars or even stranded
Chinese sailors built the Newport tower in Touro Park, they came and
left without leaving a trace - not a coin, nail or a piece of pottery.

Archaeologists who spent the past month carefully digging down to the
park's bedrock say they did not find any artifacts from earlier than
the late 1600s.

"There are no signs of human presence on this site before Colonial
times," said Dan Lynch, an archaeologist with Soil Sight LLC.

"There is no evidence of Native American use of this property either,"
said Janet F. Barstad, president of Chronognostic Research Foundation
of Tempe, Ariz., and the initiator of the dig. "We found no arrow
points, pottery or other signs that Native Americans were here.
Historians have said Native Americans did not heavily use Aquidneck
Island because of the scarcity of fresh water sources."

The results of the dig place the tower, known locally as the Old Stone
Mill, squarely in the time period when locals have long claimed it was
built. People in this area have said that Gov. Benedict Arnold built
the tower as part of a windmill. This Benedict Arnold, who died in
1678, was the great-grandfather of the Revolutionary War traitor with
the same name.

"The ground does not lie to us," said Joyce Clements, an archaeologist
with Gray & Pape Inc. of Wakefield.

The archaeologists wrapped up the dig Wednesday and filled in the
1-meter-by-1-meter holes they dug. Barstad returned to Arizona for
Thanksgiving.

Through the decades, people have said the Newport tower was once a
windmill, a round church, a watchtower, a warehouse, a market hall, a
celestial observatory or a lighthouse. The builders supposedly were
Nordic Vikings, Irish monks, Welshmen, Portuguese explorers, Dutch
adventurers or even 15th-century Chinese sailors stranded in America.

"Everyone who comes here, brings different questions of the past,"
Clements said. "Instead of going overseas to find the builders, my
question was: Who was here who had the skills to build it?"

Barstad said Colonial records indicate there were about 75 masons in
Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the late 1600s, and about 25 were
stonemasons. The Old Stone Mill, which has a base of arches, is made of
rough stones held together by mortar.

Jeremy Clark, an early settler of Newport, built a house on Thames
Street around 1670, and it was not demolished until 1960, Barstad said.
Before the large chimney was pulled down, it was photographed. The
photo, which can be seen in the 1952 book "Architectural Heritage of
Newport, R.I.," by Antoinette Downing and Vincent Scully, shows the
base of the chimney with an archway over the hearth. The archway is
similar to the archways of the Old Stone Mill, according to Barstad and
Clements.

"The skills to do this work were available locally," Clements said.

Barstad said the first "stone enders," homes with a large stone chimney
and stone wall at one end of the house, were built in Rhode Island.

"That's very provocative," she said.

Barstad said it is curious they did not find more construction material
around the tower.

"We found some split stones and chinking stones, but no other
construction materials," Clements said.

Barstad hired Ray Pasquariello, a state-licensed archaeologist with
Gray & Pape Inc., to oversee the archaeological dig. Other
archaeologists from the firm, such as Clements, also were involved.

Soil Sight's Lynch first surveyed the area around the tower with an
electronic device that uses electrical resistivity to form images of
what lies underneath the ground. He also used ground-penetrating radar.
With these readings, he used computer imaging to form cross sections of
"anomalies" that lie beneath the surface.

Lynch said they found pottery and glass fragments that could be dated,
as well as buttons, pipes and pipe stems. They also found a small
meteorite in a layer of soil from about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.
Barstad plans to have the meteorite authenticated.

The area has been a park since about 1857, three years after Judah
Touro provided Newport with the money to buy the land around the tower.
The archaeologists also found remains of previous paths, as well as
signs that topsoil had been removed and replaced with fill over the
years.

The archaeologists will complete a report and analysis of their
findings, perhaps by the end of March, Barstad said.

A 1960 dig at L'Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of
Newfoundland found the remains of a Viking settlement, including
blacksmithing artifacts such as nails and remains of structures. The
settlement was dated to around 1000 AD.

"We would have loved to find something like that here, if the Norse had
been here," Barstad said. "One would like to always find something
sensational. But no, I would not characterize the dig as disappointing,
because we came to find what was here." "

With the advantage of hindsight, it now seems a great pity that the
team did not research the old maps before they started digging. They
might then have realised they had homed in on the garden paths of the
19th century.

Suzanne Carlson in her article 'Tilting at Windmills: The Newport
Tower' NEARA Journal Vol XXX, 3&4, wrote:

"... it is interesting that on many air photos of the park, one
sees a color variation of the grass approximately twenty
meters southeast from the tower which forms a sharp
rectangular outline, perhaps a house foundation."

Attempts have been made in the past (I think both Mallory and Godfrey)
to obtain permission to explore this area but the permission has
always been withheld. I would like to think that this time, this area
was explored with Ground Penetrating Radar and electrical resistance
measurements but it would not surprise me to find that it was not
included in the current exploration.



Eric Stevens
.

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