It was 1977, and on the bulldozed and scattered remains of the city's historic waterfront, archaeologists were just a lucky turn of the spade away from the Holy Grail of Newburyport archaeological sites.
In a city filled with spectacular architecture, the long-buried and elusive ruin the diggers sought to uncover would probably be unimpressive to the casual observer. Only sorry remnants like rusty bits of metal, broken bottles and pottery and a pile of stones were likely to have survived the centuries.
But for archaeologists like Alaric Faulkner, the site was a potential goldmine.
As a complete aside, Newburyport has a radio station, WNBP that was one of my first introductions to streaming online music. There used to be a company during the Internet Bubble days that contracted to different radio stations to stream their broadcast over the Internet, and I stumbled upon it during the holiday season one year. They played a lot of the older Christmas music, very pleasant to listen to at work. Unfortunately, whatever that company was went out of business in the Internet Bust and WNBP never got back on the streaming bandwagon.
I'll put a plug in for Real's Rhapsody service. You can get a limited streaming audio player for dirt cheap, like $4 a month. It's all radio-like in that you can't pick individual songs (I think they give you 25 free plays a quarter though), but they have a good library for their pre-set stations, and you can create your own genre station by listing some songs and it will pick similar ones. That works, eh, hit and miss.
Also, KING in Seattle has a decent stream for their broadcast and it's free!