[dumping dirt] ♪ - Oh, yeah.

We got it.

- There we go.

- Yeah.

Oh!

Nice.

- I can't help but to think, who made this?

What's going on?

It's a time machine to the past.

You get to see what they were thinking, what they were doing.

And holding that piece of pottery in your hands, it's like, wow, I want to know who held this last.

How long has this been in the ground?

- [Frank Graff] And that interest has brought archaeologist Geoffrey Hughes and his class from UNC Greensboro to lot 38 on Main Street in Old Salem.

- What drew me to the Moravians is the fact that we have such a unique settlement in this part of North Carolina.

You have this religious community, a utopian community, and also looking at the relationship between religion and economics and technology.

- Oh, look at this!

- It's a nice little piece of-- ooh.

- Isn't that pretty?

- I think the whole thing's elegant.

- The group is searching for answers to a mystery dating back to 1793.

It surrounds a small experimental kiln.

The pottery produced in the kiln helped save a community.

- And the records say it was an 8 foot by 8 foot kiln.

And the reasoning for that was to produce new types of pottery.

- Pottery was an important industry, but the Moravians' pottery business was slipping.

New types of pottery made in other communities in the new nation were catching on.

- In order to remain competitive with those potters, the Moravians decide that the best way to do that is to expand their selection of offerings.

So that they could not only provide the Moravian communities with pottery, but they could also supply their non-Moravian neighbors.

- But here's the irony.

As important as it was, not much is known about that experimental kiln that fired up the pottery industry and possibly saved the community.

But we don't know exactly which lot it was built on, where it was located, and we also don't know the design of this experimental kiln based on the documents.

So that's where the archaeology comes in.

We want to try to understand, you're making an experimental kiln.

What kinds of new kiln designs are you experimenting with?

And then finally, what is the full range of pottery that's being made in this new kiln?

- So you're looking for not only where it was, but how it was located and everything.

- Yes.

Yeah.

Because it also tells us something about how the people in Salem, how they managed their space over time and the kinds of decisions that they made in terms of spatial layout and how that changed based on the community's needs and how those needs changed over time.

In the documentary record, you get the official version of events.

You get it from a particular-- from the writer's perspective.

What you don't get are the ad hoc decisions that are made on a day-to-day basis.

- I'll just excavate around it and see what comes up.

- And that's what archaeology is really good at revealing, the kinds of decisions that people make on the ground and how they actually go about putting their plans into action.

- And preliminary findings indicate the class was looking in the right place.

- It's just really cool to be able to find the past, like what we've used in the past and artifacts.

Of course, archaeology is the study of humans through artifacts.

- A brick walkway and what appears to be the top corner of a brick structure were uncovered.

The findings were at the right location and the right depth under the soil.

More work is needed to confirm the discovery was indeed the experimental pottery.

But the dig filled in a bit more of Old Salem's history.

- When you look at artifact collections in museums, you find the things that people saved.

And most of the time, the things that people saved were the good things, the special things, the things that had some kind of meaning to them at the time.

But we also want to know about the things that maybe were failures, the things that weren't the way they were supposed to be, because that can tell us a little bit more about what they were making and how they were making it.

- While archaeologists piece together how the experimental pottery was made, history shows the experiment was a success.

- In 1795, he actually goes to the church and shows them two examples of stoneware that he has successfully made.

And at that point, the church says, this is a good investment.

Now you have permission to build a kiln that is twice the size and take what you've learned from this experimental kiln and incorporate it into the pottery.

- I love the discovery process, though, because it's like it's that feeling when you find something, it's like that's the whole reason we're out here.

That's the whole reason why I have been pursuing what I've been pursuing for the last four years and studying what I've been studying.

And every time we find something, it gives us a little more insight into what we could be finding and what we're looking for.

- Thanks for watching.

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