Week 1, May 21-25, 2001
Week 2, May 28-June 1, 2001
Week 3, June 4-8, 2001
Week 4, June 11-15, 2001
Week 5, June 18-22, 2001
Week 6, June 25-29, 2001
Week 7, July 2-July 6, 2001

Week 1, May 21-25, 2001:

This week we began excavating several areas of the site where the old TABASCO^® Laboratory building once stood. First, we are digging a one-meter-wide trench that runs along the entire length of where the building's western wall once stood. In this trench, we hope to find a foundation wall that will tell us how the building was originally constructed. Also, we are searching for evidence of a trash dump where workers at the TABASCO^® Laboratory would have thrown out old bottles, tools, or anything else they used while making the sauce. Digging in someone's old trash pile may not sound too appealing, but archaeologists often find the best evidence of past lifeways in the dump. A possible location of the Laboratory's trash pile would have been near where the back door was located, which is exactly where we have placed two one-square-meter pits.

We also are looking for artifacts in the areas around the outside of the foundation walls. Many years ago, people might have thrown out or accidentally lost items as they were coming and going to the old Laboratory. After over 130 years, these items have not been moved so have been slowly, naturally covered by a layer of earth. By uncovering and examining these artifacts, we can learn about the types of behaviors and activities associated with a nineteenth-century manufacturing site that grew from a small operation into a world-famous company.

Artifacts are recovered by excavating dirt from the site and then using garden hoses to wash it through a screen with one-quarter-inch holes. When the dirt washes through the holes, only artifacts are left in the screen. So far, we have found a lot of broken glass, including a few pieces of old TABASCO^® bottles, some rusty nails, and some broken pottery. However, this is only the first week, and there will likely be lots of interesting surprises ahead!

Week 2, May 28-June 1, 2001:

The weather has really turned hot this week! Luckily, we have a small tent to shade some of the excavators. The western wall trench continues to grow deeper and deeper as we try to find the base of the wall. When the building was constructed many years ago, a large hole was dug in which the foundation wall was begun. As the wall became taller and taller with the addition of more bricks, the remaining space around the bricks was filled in with dirt. Many years later, we are excavating that dirt from around the bricks, hoping to find an artifact that was lost as the hole was filled in. If we find an artifact in the trench and can tell how old it is, then we can know about when the building was constructed. The area where we thought there might have been a trash dump has produced very few artifacts. This means that workers at the Laboratory must have been taking their trash somewhere else. Luckily, a few McIlhenny family members remember seeing some broken glass and ceramics in a nearby gully. We investigated the gully and believe that it may be a great spot to excavate. In fact, one of the crew has discovered the remains of a very old roadbed that leads from near the back of the Laboratory site right to the gully. Crew member and University of Alabama graduate student Wes Shaw was able to begin excavating in the trash gully at the end of this week. Another important part of the Laboratory project is to understand just how much space and how many buildings were needed to produce TABASCO^® Brand Pepper Sauce. Although production certainly began in the Laboratory, the demand for sauce grew so rapidly in the late nineteenth century that Edmund McIlhenny and his sons were running out of room in which to make it. They probably had to expand production to nearby outbuildings that were also used for the family's sugar cane operation. Miranda Moore, another graduate student from the University of Alabama, spent much of this week trudging through a thick bamboo forest looking for remains of these outbuildings. When she came across any old bricks or other artifacts, she drew them on a map of the area.

Week 3, June 4-8, 2001:

Making progress in archaeological field work is often dictated by Mother Nature. This week she brought us Tropical Storm Allison, so we were not able to do much excavating. After making sure our excavation units at the Laboratory site were shielded from the rain by boards and plastic tarps, we headed indoors to catch up on some laboratory tasks. For every day we spend digging at a site, we must spend at least twice that long processing what we find. Processing involves washing, sorting, and labeling artifacts, of which we did plenty while the rains came down. We were also able to spend several rainy afternoons doing research in the McIlhenny Company/Avery Island, Inc., Archives, with guidance from company historian and curator, Dr. Shane K. Bernard. This research helps us place our archaeological findings in a more complete historical context and is a necessary step for any historical archaeological project. While it's nice to catch up on processing and research, I do hope we will be able to get back to excavating the original TABASCO^® sauce Laboratory next week!!

Week 4, June 11-15, 2001:

Much of Monday was spent cleaning up the site, which was slightly muddied from all of last week's rain. Our findings this week are intriguing. Excavations around the interior of the northwest corner of the building have begun to reveal a thick slab of bricks and mortar. It appears to be a square-shaped piece of a wall that has fallen over. We'll soon know once it is completely uncovered. Excavations continue in the area underneath where the Laboratory's front porch would have been situated. This area would have had a lot of foot traffic, so we hope to find artifacts there that will inform us of the daily activities that took place at the building. The soil on the hill where the Laboratory sat has a lot of clay in it, so excavation is slow. All the dirt we remove from the site is screened through a wire mesh using water; when the dirt washes through, artifacts remain in the screen and then are collected in bags. The bags of artifacts are then transported to our laboratory for processing and analysis.

At the other end of the Laboratory site, we are investigating an area near where the back door would have been. There is a thin layer of cement here, probably used as a driveway on which wagons laden with supplies and newly bottled TABASCO^® sauce would have been driven. Underneath the cement are layers of brick rubble, shell, and sand, obviously the result of someone trying to keep the driveway usable before they finally capped it with cement. Along the north wall of the building, quite near the former location of a side door, all sorts of interesting artifacts are appearing. From this area, we have recovered unusual iron mechanical parts, glass beakers, and the balancing arm of a tiny brass scale. What were these things used for? We may never know, but further excavation and lab processing could hold the answer.

Week 5, June 18-22, 2001

Time is certainly flying by. There are only 10 more excavation days with the entire crew. After June 29th there will only be a few of us left to finish up this project, so we must make the most of the time we have left!

This week we discovered some interesting things about the soil in the area of the site where the Laboratory's front porch once stood. First, we found a half-rotted cypress plank, laying flat within a thin deposit of shell. This feature certainly appeared to have served a purpose at one time -- but it may be that both the plank and the shell are just remnants of trash long ago discarded under the porch. Nearby, also in the porch area, we found more remains of a rotted plank. Perhaps as boards in the porch became worn and needed replacing they were simply dropped below the structure before new planks were installed. Also interesting about this area is the patchy appearance of the soil. It looks as if someone had been dumping small buckets of clayish dirt, one at a time. Perhaps someone had been attempting to raise the level of the ground in order to support the porch and to minimize erosion at the top of the hill.

More progress has been made in our investigations of the Laboratory's doorways. Last year's crew excavated a 1-meter-square unit where they believed the south wall's side door would have been located. Unable to complete the unit because of time constraints, we have re-opened the unit this week. If we find evidence of the doorway, we may follow its path into the cellar of the building. If we do not find evidence of the doorway, we will move either to the east or west of the unit and try again.

The most dramatic activity has surrounded the excavation of the Laboratory's interior. As mentioned in the "Update" for Week 1, we have so far concentrated our efforts on excavating areas outside the building's foundation walls. However, this week we began removing huge amounts of soil from the interior of the building. When the crumbling old Laboratory was demolished in 1927, a gaping, dangerous hole was left in the ground. This hole was filled with loads of dirt from elsewhere on the Island. By removing this fill dirt, we hope to reveal the remains of what used to be the large brick tower, as well as other foundations. Hopefully, this will give us some clues about the nature of the Laboratory's construction and destruction. Thank goodness we have help from McIlhenny Company and Avery Island, Inc., laborers, who make quick work of shoveling out the fill dirt!

Week 6, June 25-29, 2001

Well, it took most of the week, but the fill dirt that covered the Laboratory's structural remains since 1927 has been removed from the western third of the building. Most of the crew spent all week carefully scooping and brushing away pockets of dirt from around the newly exposed remains. The most prominent feature to be revealed is the foundation of what we think is the oldest part of the structure, a three-brick-wide wall that supported the Laboratory's three-story tower. Only eight courses of bricks remained, because, when the building was demolished, most of the bricks were salvaged and used to construct other buildings on Avery Island. Those that were broken during the demolition process were thrown into the hole left by their removal. This resulted in what we archaeologists uncovered 74 years later: short brick walls in the shape of the building, with remnants of a cement floor covered with broken bricks rejected by the demolition crew in 1927. Within the rubble of the interior we located several interesting deposits of artifacts. First, we found a few shards of a stoneware churn and an olive green glass bottle. These almost certainly are fragments of the churns and bottles pictured in the only known photograph of the Laboratory's interior, and were used to make early batches of TABASCO^® sauce. Second, we found a thin layer of ash and mortar atop the tower wall's remnants. This ash layer is evidence of some sort of fire that, because of its location, we know must have taken place after the building's demolition. Within the ash are concentrations of ammunition cartridges and small mammal bones. The bones, primarily those of rats and birds, were preserved by the ash that enveloped them. When further analyzed, these remains can be identified by genus and species so that we may have a picture of what sorts of little animals roamed the Island many years ago.

As mentioned last week, we have been searching for the side door on the building's south wall. We did not find it in the unit we re-opened, so we decided to look immediately to the west of that area, and were finally successful. The remains of the doorway consist of several cement-covered brick steps leading down to a brick threshold. The bricks in this wall were salvaged in 1927, so all that remains is a line of bricks, two abreast and two deep, that runs east-west. On each side of the steps is a thin brick retaining wall constructed to prevent soil from washing down the hillside and into the doorway. When we removed the soil and fill dirt from the unit in the wall's interior, we encountered a cement floor. This is the cellar floor of the Laboratory -- the very floor on which TABASCO^® sauce was first made. Still, the most interesting find within these doorway units was an unusual v-shaped gutter in the cement, which runs parallel to the building's outer wall. This shallow gutter probably served as a drain into which workers washed spilt pepper mash, vinegar, and sauce from the cement floor. The drain and the remains of this wall can be traced to the southeastern corner of the building, where the gutter empties into a sewer pipe. This drain's existence suggests that TABASCO^® sauce production required special architectural modifications to the Laboratory.

The building's southeastern corner is also the place where we found a small pile of unbroken TABASCO^® bottles. These bottles, about a dozen in all, were left just outside the back door of the Laboratory and were forgotten until we carefully uncovered them. Today's TABASCO^® bottles take their shape from these early ones, whose bases read "McIlhenny TABASCO^® Pepper Sauce."

Well, most of the crew left the Island this Friday. But our discoveries this week require the rest of us to continue working next week. We hope to find answers to at least a few more questions. Also, after six weeks of exploration, it's time to think about closing down the site.

Week 7, July 2-July 6

An important part of our work this season has been to photograph and sketch the soil layers and structural remains that we find. So much of the interior of the Laboratory has been uncovered that we spent a lot of time drawing those features. Along with the photographs, these drawings will help us to remember what we discovered, and where we discovered it, once we return to our own laboratories at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and begin to analyze and write about our findings.

This week, while some of us completed drawings, others investigated an area within the foundations of the tower. Avery and McIlhenny family tradition holds that this tower may once have been used as a pigeonniere (pigeon house), and that the larger, rectangular, brick-and-clapboard structure of the Laboratory was added to the tower by Confederate soldiers during the early years of the Civil War. Edmund McIlhenny later supposedly converted the structure into his pepper sauce manufactory. Family tradition notwithstanding, a three-brick-thick structure seems quite formidable for a pigeon house. Perhaps there had been a pigeonniere in this location that was later replaced by the sturdier tower? To answer this question, we needed to look below the cement floor of the tower. In one area of its remains, a section of cement was already missing, and within the exposed clay were small, broken bottles and a child's large marble. Although located beneath the level of the cement floor, these artifacts could have been deposited after the cement was removed. We now needed to remove some of the remaining cement to see if there were artifacts there. We did so, and discovered nothing but clay. Thus, we have no evidence for earlier structural remains under the tower, but we do have some interesting artifacts that could be at least as old as the tower itself. For example, the child's marble can be dated rather accurately based on its method of manufacture and decoration, so this will be one of the first things we look at when we return to our labs in Tuscaloosa.

After making sure that all drawings, photographs, notes, and samples had been taken, it was time to wrap up our second season of archaeology on Avery Island. The final step in any field season is to backfill the site. Many people are surprised that after so much work uncovering remains we would actually want to rebury them. Actually, the best way to preserve and stabilize the remains is to cover them with sterile sand. The sand keeps everything in place, prevents side-walls of excavation units from collapsing, and is easily removed should we ever return to investigate more of the site.

The past seven weeks have certainly proven to be a successful archaeological season. We have learned much about the early history of the production of TABASCO^® sauce, as well as about the Laboratory in which it was born. Our task now is to analyze all the artifacts and to write a report of our findings, so that we may share our discoveries with everyone.