UWM Field School 2025

  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...

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,...

  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...

  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!

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.

  Awesome progress this week as everyone worked to finish their test units! All the digging is done and official photos taken in all the units, and there is just some paperwork to make sure everything is fully documented.  In some areas though, the last bits of digging revealed more questions than answers. For example in Unit 05 (above), there is one large, isolated posthole that doesn't seem related to anything else we've found so far. Unit 06 has a large pit feature (about 85cm diameter), as well as this weird rectangle in the northeast corner. The pit is exciting, and will probably be interesting to excavate, but we aren't quite sure what the rectangle could be. It is too wide for a typical wall trench, but matches the directional orientation of other features at the site. Hopefully knocking down the baulk between Units 05 and 06 will provide some clarity, since it will let us see the whole thing. In addition to finishing digging in our test units today, we have been wor...

Despite my lack of title ideas, we are progressing rapidly with excavation of our initial test units, and continuing to find tons of cool features! Units 06 and 07 both have pit features. In many cases, these begin as storage pits but are later converted into trash pits. The picture above is a Western view of Unit 07, and the pit feature is the large, dark circle in the Northwest corner. It contains pieces of pottery and charcoal, and is about 60cm in diameter. It also directly abuts the wall of a structure; note the line of postholes extending in a line from the Southwest to Northeastern half of the unit. Although a few days ago we thought we were seeing a corner of a structure, the dark spot that looked to be at a right angle to those in this line disappeared when Aiden and Dakota cleaned the floor, which means it was just a remnant splotch of the overlying soil. We have found other semi-isolated postholes in Units 03, 08, and 11 that so far don't seem to be in any particular lin...

Today was an interesting one in terms of weather, although we did get a reprieve from the heat. Instead, we were treated to the constant threat of rain. It stormed overnight and water collected in the tarps laid down over top of our units. We spent almost an hour bailing before we could open up for the day, and even so we had to keep a close eye on the weather radar in case we had to close up quickly. But we prevailed, and got a solid half-day of digging in... before we did, in fact, get stormed out around 2pm and headed to the Edgerton library. We made the most of our digging time, with Jadon and Veronica in Unit 04 getting down to level so we can finally see what is fully going on!  There is a wall trench running roughly WNW to ESE across the center of Unit 04, with a possible hearth feature to the north, and at least one (possibly 2?) parallel rows of post holes south of the wall trench. As we zoom out with this drone shot, we can see that the wall trench in Unit 04 runs perpend...

I think it is officially summer, as it was over 70 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we started at 8am this morning, and only got warmer from there. Nevertheless, everyone did a fantastic job today with paying attention to how they felt and adapting to the heat! Keep up the good work, as it looks like the heat may continue into next week. Both Units 01 (top left) and 02 (top center) have now finished digging thanks to their shallow plow zone and the fantastic work of Rowan, Peter, Josh L, and Josh J! After their floor clean, the drone got this great image showing the parallel wall trenches that run through these units. Depending on how long the trench in Unit 02 runs for, we may end up seeing another part of it in the southeastern quad of Unit 05 (bottom left) Harder to see, but also interesting, are a couple of posthole features and a patch of soil discoloration in the southern portion of Unit 01. One posthole is outlined next to Rowan's left boot, and the other is the dark circle be...