Over the summer of 2019, Hunter Research, in partnership with the Monmouth University Department of History and Anthropology, with funding support from NJM Insurance, and on behalf of the Trent House Association, organized a highly successful and productive archaeology field school on the grounds of the William Trent House in the heart of historic Trenton. Undergraduate students working for credit and hand-picked volunteers from NJM Insurance learned the craft of archaeological excavation and documentation on one of the richest sites in the Delaware Valley. A trove of Native American, European Contact period and early historic artifacts were recovered from a four-foot-deep sequence of deposits in front of the house and on the site of the adjoining mid-18th-century kitchen wing. Visitors came from near and far to learn of the fascinating discoveries made. Plans are afoot to mount a second season of the field school in 2020.
Training Future Archaeologists at the William Trent House
Rutgers Respectfully Redisposes of the Dead
In downtown Newark on Halsey Street, in the shadow of the Prudential Tower, Rutgers University through the agency of RBH Project, LLC is nearing completion of its new Honors Living-Learning Center. This major addition to the Rutgers-Newark campus, bounded by Washington, New, Halsey and Linden Streets, encompasses almost an entire block in the city’s historic core and lies within the James Street Commons Historic District. In the center of the block there used to be a cemetery associated with the Halsey Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark’s first Methodist house of worship, established in 1808-09. Interments were made in the cemetery from early in the 19th century until around 1870. In the 1920s, all burials were supposedly removed to make way for a parking lot for the nearby Hahne’s department store.
As so often happens, the disinterment of bodies from abandoned cemeteries was haphazard and far from complete.Over the course of ten months in 2017, Hunter Research painstakingly removed no less than 335 burials, including 138 largely complete skeletons, many jumbled reinterments (including a group of children in a single box) and several partial disinterments (left-overs from the 1920s parking lot episode).In September 2018, after exhaustive analysis in the Hunter Research and Monmouth University laboratories, all human remains were transported to Hollywood Cemetery in Union, New Jersey and ceremonially reburied.A report on this complex archaeological endeavor, one of very few comprehensively reported cemetery excavations in New Jersey, was completed in the spring of 2019 and is available here.
Hunter Research Receives Historic Bridge Preservation Award
Hunter Research, Inc. received a 2019 Preservation Achievement Award from the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance for the firm’s work on the “Restoration, Rehabilitation and Stewardship of the Stewartstown Bridge.” The Stewartstown Bridge, also known as the Beecher Falls Bridge, crosses the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont near the Canadian border. The steel deck arch bridge is a two-rib, two-hinge, spandrel-braced design. Erected in 1930-1931, the bridge is historically noteworthy as having received the American Institute of Steel Construction’s “Most Beautiful Steel Bridge Award,” adding to the reputation of its designing engineer Harold E. Langley as an expert in steel arch bridges. As a member of a New Hampshire Department of Transportation led team, Hunter Research supported the project through completion of a Phase I archaeology study and a historic structures report (HSR). The HSR was instrumental in providing historically based data to inform decisions guiding restoration and rehabilitation activities from selection of historically appropriate railings, which would meet current standards, to methods of repairing the riveted steel arch ribs. The project was completed with a finding of no adverse effect on the historic bridge. For more information on the project and the award click this link.