Tim Cook Archaeologist Barbara Kipfer of Ivoryton is assisted by Samantha Cox, 15, of Mendham, N.J., and Brennan Gauthier, 17, of Southbridge, Mass., both with the University of Connecticut's Mentor Connection, as they excavate the site of the former carriage house at the John Bishop Museum in Lisbon Thursday.

Lisbon— State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni began his search in the foundations of a carriage shed at the John Bishop House Museum Thursday, hoping to preserve historical artifacts from the grounds before the museum begins a reconstruction of the 19th-century building.

Bellantoni and a group of volunteers were hard at work Thursday afternoon next to the museum on Route 169, overturning and sifting soil around crumbling stonewalls that supported the shed when it was built, between 1830 and 1850.

“We're trying to mitigate or recover what we can” before construction starts on the new shed, Bellantoni said.

The reconstruction will be funded by a $25,000 grant from the Quinebaug-Shetucket Heritage Corridor Inc., said Carolyn Read-Burns, president of the Lisbon Historical Society, which operates the museum.

The new shed will be a replica of the original building, which was demolished in 1992, but with a modern foundation and a small kitchen area for museum functions, she said.

The grant stipulates that the building be finished by Oct. 31, Read-Burns said, but the project will be allowed to take longer if Bellantoni's search turns up any meaningful results.

So far, volunteers have not found much, but Bellantoni said they had only just begun.

The excavation was planned for Thursday and today, but Bellantoni said the length of the project would be determined by what he finds.

“We'll see where it goes today,” he said. “We may have to come back a couple more days.”

“It's not the greatest site,” said Brennan Gauthier, 17, who spent the past three weeks working with Bellantoni as part of the University of Connecticut's Mentor Connection program.

But Gauthier, a student at the Pomfret School who is originally from Southbridge, Mass., said the search could prove fruitful once the volunteers have dug deeper into the foundation.

“Hopefully, when we get down a foot, we'll find some carriage stuff,” he said.

By mid-day Thursday, Bellantoni and the others had found evidence of changes in the vehicles once stored here: a few feet from where the group uncovered an old horseshoe, they later found a tire iron and fragments from a license plate.

Volunteers were also hard at work on the site of a former outhouse, just behind the carriage shed, where they said some of the best artifacts are found.

“A lot of times at the bottom of a privy you find interesting things,” said Dave Cooke, a volunteer who said he has been assisting archaeological digs around the state for 40 years.

Asked to identify a fragment of clay pipe discovered by one of the volunteers, Cooke said it was probably from the late 19th century.

Cooke said his wife is the founder of Friends of the Office of State Archaeology, a volunteer group that supplements Bellantoni's state budget by paying for his cell phone and assisting on digs. Several group members were on hand Thursday, helping in the search.