Cupids

The remnants of a wall that was built to protect
their houses from invading ships.

I had the opportunity to visit Cupids a few times throughout the summer. It was pretty fun, not only because I love road trips but also because of the rich history that is there. There's an archaeological dig going on there currently that is exploring John Guy's settlement there and I got to get a front row view of the place.

The remnants of the forge.

The first thing you'll notice is that they have built a skeleton structure of the original building. They built the structure of the original building so that you can walk through it and really see what it looked like without obstructing the archaeological dig.

You can see the dark patch where the forge itself was. The
slurry byproduct of the heated metals dyed the ground darker.
The trail leading from it is where the water would have
trickled off, farther down the forge. 

The section in the pictures on the left is what is left of their forge. Something that an archaeologist taught me while I was there was that you can tell where their forge, cooling vat, and drain were based on the colour of the stains in the dirt. It blows my mind that four hundred years later you can still see the stains in the dirt.

 It was really cool to see this. I've always loved archaeology. When I went to Russell's Point, I loved researching all the archaeological research that they did. To get to walk onto an archaeological dig was a dream come true for me.

The shadow house. It was really cool to walk in there and
think that this was actually where the first structure was built.
I literally got to walk in history.

It was also really cool seeing what they were able to find. If I'd seen the stained dirt, I would have thought "Hey, cool. Colourful dirt." They saw it and were able to map out something that was destroyed at least three centuries ago.









The three pictures below are of remnants of graves. When you go there you can look at a logbook they had of people who had died there. It was both interesting and witty as they had often spoke in riddles. One person had "died of thought", which refers to how the man had killed someone in England, hopped on a boat, and went to the New World in hopes of escaping. He presumable died either of the stress of guilt or that he may have killed himself.

If there's anything that I learned from my experience in Cupids, it was that you can't dismiss anything at face value. They look past the obvious in order to discover the truth hidden underneath. This encounter really rekindled my love for archaeology and mysteries. I know that I have to go back there some day.