Day 16! Another hot one

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 below and left of the green tape measure. 

Today in Unit 04 (middle left in first photo), we found a sherd of decorated Late Woodland ceramic. This is older than the Oneota component that we are targeting, but it is a super cool find! It is grit tempered, meaning crushed up rocks are incorporated into the clay, and was decorated with cord impressions before being fired.

Unit 07 had an exciting day as well; in addition to the pit feature found yesterday in the Northwest quad and the 3 postholes in the Southwest, we found four more postholes when Aiden and Dakota opened the Northeast quad. One of these is at a pretty perfect right angle to the line of the others, indicating that we may have a corner of a structure! Also, please enjoy my sketchmap :)

Unit 09 is not quite at the B Horizon yet, but has been finding a lot of fire-cracked rocks and some burnt sandstone. Cat, Shannon, and I are hopeful this is an early indicator of a feature below.

The not-quite-a-wall-trench that we observed yesterday in Unit 11, as it turns out, is nothing but an unusually deep plow scar. We became suspicious of it when we found an identical feature in Unit 10, and did some further probing. This led us to discover that the "feature" only descended about 2-3cm. Plow scars occur when the teeth of a plow bite into lower levels, but don't fully mix them up, and tend to fade out the deeper you dig. True features, on the other hand, tend to become clearer as you dig into them.

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