Day 18! I'm running out of creative titles for these

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 linear orientation. These will require a bit more exploration to determine their purpose and relationship to other features. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

End of Week 1!

Image
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 Madis...
Read more

End of Week 2!

Image
 Congratulations everyone! You have all successfully made it through Week 2 of field school, and have now acquired the necessary skills to conduct archaeological survey.  We spent the morning making maps of the "new site" we "discovered" yesterday during our Shovel Test survey of the parking area. While it's not technically a new site, it does represent a distinct cluster of Late Woodland grit-tempered pottery from occupations that preceded the Oneota component that our excavation will focus on. Then, we transitioned into working on our first skill associated with excavation, which will start in earnest next week: setting up units! This skill was harder than some people expected, but everyone got the hang of it in the end. Next week, we'll be doing it for real...  But over the weekend, please enjoy some photos of the more memorable moments from this week! You may notice that it is a little heavy on photos (and clay models) of Sean. I guess that means Rick an...
Read more

Day 23 - MEGASCRAPE! :D

Image
  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...
Read more