The Digital Scholarship Group is collaborating with Dr. Christy Potroff, BC Assistant Professor of English, and Dr. Donald Slater, an archaeologist Colonial America expert at Phillips Academy, on excavating and preserving Anne Bradstreet’s house. The DSG is scanning the site and the structural remains, building a database for the discovered artifacts, and guiding students through the process of digitizing excavation records and cataloging artifacts.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) is one of the most important American poets. Her 1650 volume, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, is recognized as the first book of poetry published in the New World–by a man or woman. It was a bestseller in London and is even said to have featured in the library of King George III. One of Bradstreet’s most famous poems, “Verses upon the Burning of our House, July 10th, 1666,” describes the lamentable destruction of her Massachusetts home, the very one being excavated. 

Scanning the Excavation Site

The scanning of the site is done periodically to record the state of the excavation trench using photogrammetry, a technique that produces high-resolution 3D models from photographs. These scans not only record the current state of the features but also allow the Bradstreet team to include other scholars in the site’s interpretive process by sharing the resulting models with them. It also preserves a facsimile of the in-situ archeological features to reference in the event of weather-related alteration or their necessary removal. Models of the most important artifacts recovered from the excavation can be used for virtual exhibits and interactive online publications that share the exciting discoveries of the Bradstreet House Excavations with the public. (Read the “Finding Bradstreet” blog post to learn more about the Bradstreet project.)