End of Week 1!

Congratulations to everyone for making it through the first week! You all have learned so much already, and hopefully had some fun along the way. Good news on that front; there's so much more to come!

We started off today talking about how to take good field notes. This is possibly the most important skill in all of archaeology, because once things are out of the ground, there's no putting them back exactly the same way, and field notes are our only way of reconstructing the relationships between artifacts.

We spent the rest of the day doing more pedestrian survey. This is really paying off, and will be very useful when we decide where to put our excavation units! In the southern portion of the East Field, we have some huge clusters of shell-tempered pottery that are promising indications of where Oneota-period habitation structures were.

In the West Field, we have been seeing a lot of lithic debitage at the north end, and a transition to ceramics and formal tools such as Madison Points and scrapers as we move south up the hill. 

And we had another exciting find today in the West Field: two fluted lancolate type lithics, located about 20m apart! The first (pictured above), is a preform, or a piece of stone that was worked with the intent to turn it into a point, but it was never finished or the knapper made an irrecoverable mistake. The other was fluted lancolate base, which looked to have snapped about a third of the way up the original point. These artifacts are significant because this type of technology isn't usually associated with the Oneota archaeological tradition. Instead, they tend to be older, from the Woodland or Archaic period.