LEWISTON – Rick Morris isn’t expecting to uncover gold coins or rare pottery in his latest archaeological dig.

Nails, bits of coal and old pipe stems are more like it.

Morris, a professional archaeologist, hopes to wrap up a small-scale dig by Saturday in the heart of Lewiston, at 2 Howe St.

He’s not seeking the bones of an old civilization, but crumbs left behind by this one.

“In Lewiston, all of our history is about the mill, and that’s fine,” Morris said. “That was the economic engine of the area. But I’m looking here at the way the people lived, the people that worked in the mill.”

With blessings from the Maine Time Dollar Network, he’s digging a small trench between the network’s garage and its neighbor’s house. It’s a narrow passage, less than 3 feet wide and about a dozen feet long.

He digs out the topsoil layers at a time, then takes it to a sifting table set up in front of the garage. As the dirt drops away, the larger chunks get caught in the wire mesh. Those could be rocks or bits of glass, buttons or something else. If Morris decided they deserve deeper study, he saves them in a labeled paper bag.

He hopes to use those bits to figure out the story behind the house, how it was used and who might have lived there. He’s looking for simple things, not things that would end up on display in a gallery.

“The keepsake items, those are the things that wind up in a museum,” Morris said. “The kind of stuff you expect to find here is the everyday stuff, the things that were really used day in and day out.”

So far, that’s included plenty of coal and leftover coal slag from stoves, bits of glass, nails and an old pipe stem. All of it could have been the result of a good cleaning of a coal stove. Broken dishes, bottles and pipe stems all used to go right into the coal stove, he said, until they were cleaned out and dumped out of the way.

“A place like this is perfect for finding those forgotten things because it’s not a path, or place people normally went,” he said. “Things collect there, year after year, and get buried over.”

The goal is to get down to the glacial soil, the stuff that was in place before people inhabited the area. After a few weeks of research in local libraries and Lewiston City Hall, Morris figures he’ll have a good idea of what happened on that lot, strata by strata, year by year.

His results are destined to be displayed in the Time Dollar Network’s office and cafe at 2 Howe St. Kristine Kimball of the network said the group needed to have a trench dug at the back of the garage to fix a drainage problem. Morris, a member of the barter network, offered to dig the trench if they let him turn it into an archaeological dig.

It’s only the second dig he’s done in the Twin Cities, and the first in Lewiston. He hopes to begin work at a north Main Street site next month.

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