In the spring of 2013 I attended a community information
session for the Quidi Vidi Village Field School. I was intrigued when a woman
from the village spoke up and mentioned the degree to which the area had changed
in recent years, and how a great number of buildings had either fallen down or
been demolished in recent years. This is a theme that I have heard again and
again since beginning the field school this September.
As an archaeologist my ears instinctively perk up when I
hear about architecture and other physical remains that no longer exists: those
that have long ago, or even recently, vanished into the landscape. I often find
myself inspecting old timbers sticking out of an eroding bank while pondering
their origins, or picking up discarded objects found along a pathway to try to
decipher what the discarded garbage used to be. At the field school, I’ve
embraced this curiosity and descended into the village to look for clues and traces
of the architecture and physical objects that were once a common part of this
bustling little place, but have now disappeared. On Tuesday I climbed to the
top of a hill behind the village to look at the foundations of what was once a
farmhouse. Today the tide was the lowest that I have noticed yet so it was the
perfect day to look for traces of old structures along the waters edge.
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Remains of a wharf in front of the Flake House |
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Ballast pound, likely from an old stage |
Directly after leaving the Plantation – which itself is
named after a building that no longer exists – I caught a glimpse of broken and
submerged timbers in front of the now vacant Flake House restaurant. I asked a
man who was working on a boat near by if he knew what they were and he told me
that they once belonged to a wharf that the owners let go. Further down the
road, past the Quidi Vidi Brewery, I stumbled upon two old ballast pounds - as
well as bricks and old timbers - all of which were likely the remains of fish
stages once situated on the bank of the bay. My journey ended at Land Rock, the
site of an eighteenth and nineteenth-century fishing station. While visible
remnants of the station’s architecture are likely long gone, signs of the areas
past activities can still be found in the form of eighteenth and nineteenth-century
ceramics, glass, and pipe stems littered across the beach and eroding from its
banks. While much of the village has changed, my short walk has clearly shown
me that clues about its former shape can still be easily seen inscribed within
the contemporary landscape.
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Building rubble along the bay |
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A late 18th or early 19th century pipe stem fragment |
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