The archaeology department is currently sorting soil from a dig site in the Great Neck area of ...

April 5, 2016

The archaeology department is currently sorting soil from a dig site in the Great Neck area of Virginia Beach. The material they're looking at is from pits that date back to about 200-500 AD. Lucy Treado, a research technician for the museum, is processing the soil with a flotation method that sorts out the contents of the soil based on weight.

So far, they've seen lots of shells and fish bones that were food for the people living there, but there's also a lot of plant material that can't be identified with the naked eye. The museum is planning on sending the vegetation to an archaeobotanist, a person who specializes in the relationship between plants and humans.

Dr. Elizabeth Moore, curator of archaeology, hopes that they will find squash phytoliths, a small part of the plant that doesn't decay. If they find these phytoliths it would show that people were eating domesticated plants in Great Neck that far back.