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Last day of field school! : ) :

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  Today was our last official day of the field school, and at least for me, it is a little bittersweet. Over the last six weeks, all twenty-four of you have become competent field archaeologists who can conduct both survey and excavation, accurately map an area using either pencil and paper or with a Total Station, and interpret past cultural activities based on the artifacts they left behind. I have been honored to be a part of your learning journeys, and as you all continue on into whatever adventure awaits, I can only hope that you've found this a valuable experience. Speaking of what you've found, we uncovered around a dozen storage/trash pits of various sizes, half of which were excavated. These pits contained a fair bit of charcoal and burnt sandstone, the occasional lithics, and some really impressive sherds of pottery, such as the one above from Feature 82. Other than pits, we have found 120 postholes (by my best count, anyway), comprising at least two distinct structur...
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Day 27!

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Apologies for the spotty blog coverage this week; so much has been going on, I can hardly keep track! Most people are either finished bisecting their features or veryyyyyy close! Since the photos above were taken, Features 25-47, -137, -140, -110, and -109 (left) have been completely dug, sketch of the profile drawn, and remaining Feature Fill partially removed for flotation. Features 25-40 and -142 (right) only have a few more centimeters of digging before they are ready to do the same. In addition to making incredible progress on our feature excavations, everyone is gaining experience with a variety of mapping and recording skills this week, including the setup and use of a Total Data Station to collect accurate spatial data in three dimensions, and the mapping of both large and small features/structures by hand with pencil and paper.
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Day 25! Pits, Postholes, and Profiles, oh my!

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  Today, most everyone continued with bisecting their features down the middle. We reached the bottom of several of the small pits, and are well on our way in several others! One pit, Feature 115, we expected to be fairly shallow (~20-30cm) based on its small diameter, but so far it extends down at least 30-40 cm and is still going strong!  In several pits, including Feature 84 (above) with Hannah and Emma, Feature 47 with Kate and Veronica, and Feature 28 with Mike and Aiden we have discovered one or more postholes that were formerly invisible. Our next step will be to map in these new postholes, and clean up the wall profile to see if the posthole is visible extending through the pit (meaning the pit was there first, and the post was put in later), or not (meaning the posthole was there first, and the pit was dug later). We also discovered a new line of postholes below part of the "spooky" area inside Structure 01! These are south of Feature 65, and run in a line at a sligh...
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End of Week 5! Starting Features!

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At long last, we have started digging into the features that we so lovingly uncovered over the past two and a half weeks! So far, we have started digging our hearth feature, several pits of various sizes, one of the "spooky" areas (which has been renamed "the bean" due to its kidney bean-esque shape), and several postholes. Thus far, only the hearth has been fully bisected (thanks to the speedy work of Javi and Jadon!), but the rest are coming along quickly! In fact, Cat and Peter have already found this awesome rim sherd from Feature 82, which is a fairly large pit feature southeast of Structure 01. The sherd looks to be from a vessel of Grand River Plain style, which is characterized by shell tempering, no decoration around the lip, and a rectilinear (straight) neck. We also spent some time today trying to suss out the features associated with the long line of postholes spanning from the former Unit 08 to Unit 05. I think we may have a corner just east of Unit 05,...
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Day 23 - MEGASCRAPE! :D

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  Today, we did a megascrape of all our units! It was a long process, and especially tedious in areas near the edges of our protective tarps where the dirt turned to mud. But it really paid off when we took our big photos: Top left: Entire open excavation area with features visible Top right: Closeup of Structure 25-01 (in former units 01, 02, and 04). It has all four walls and corners, some pits, a possible hearth, potential doorway, and a "spooky" area that we suspect may be a house floor! Bottom: Closeup of line of posts and pits (in former units 06, 07, and 08 western extension). Although closer investigation is required, our current working hypothesis is that this line of posts may be a wall of another structure extending further west (under our backdirt pile, of course...) After the megascrape and photos, we took some time to map in all our features and give them numbers. Tomorrow, feature excavation begins, and we will hopefully start to answer some of our burning ques...
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Day 21! Mud slip'n'slides

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  We had a couple of weather-related false starts this morning; by the time we had bailed out the rainwater from last night, another storm cell was passing over and we had to start again! We didn't get the tarps off until nearly 10:45, over 2 hours past our usual digging start time. Despite this, we moved a lot of dirt today! All the remaining baulks between our test units came down, and we finished opening up the entire 16m area between Units 02 and 11. Tomorrow we are going to wrap up the last little bit of digging, give it all a nice, clean trowel scrape, and finally get a good photo of all our features! Students, you should be proud of all the progress we have made so far this week! Here is a comparison from June 11 when we were all still in test units, where we were at the end of the day yesterday, and a sketch of the full area we had opened by the end of work today!
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Day 20! Chunking it out

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Since last Friday everyone finished digging their 2x2 test units and we now have the lay of the land, this week started off with a bang as we began knocking down the baulks between units and extending out in areas where we know there are features. It has really paid off, too! We've opened a ton of new area and will have a decent idea of what we are working with hopefully by lunch tomorrow.  And we officially have found all four corners of a single structure, the first time this has ever been done at KCV! Although we know where all the corners are for the structure that first showed up in Units 01, 02, and 04, it also seems to be a little more complicated, as additional postholes in Units 03 and 05 don't quite fit with this interpretation. It is possible that some of this was caused by rebuilding of structures in similar places, but we won't know for sure until we open up a bit more space and follow out those lines.
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