Either way we feel that this is a very important find. Tentatively guessing, if this is a tent cellar, the trash in the pit is probably from when the strikers reoccupied Ludlow after the massacre and cleaned up the original colony. One of the first artifacts we found when we started excavating here was the wire frame for a wreath, lying at the top of all the trash in the pit. We are still analyzing the artifacts we found in the pit. Many of the tin cans appear to be for evaporated or condensed milk.
Archaeology is more than just excavating.
Lab work cleaning, identifying, and analyzing all the artifacts from the excavation is a vital part of the archaeological project. The lab work on the Ludlow artifacts is still continuing, so we aren t able to draw any firm conclusions just yet. A number of things have struck us about the sorts of things we are finding. One of the main things the artifacts speak of is the day of the massacre. What we most often find on archaeological sites are the things people threw away.