Day 25! Pits, Postholes, and Profiles, oh my!

 

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 slightly offset angle compared to the south wall of the structure. While we'll still need to do more investigating, so far it seems like the "spooky" area may be an area where a variety of existing features were disturbed and muddled together over time (due to subsequent habitation over top of them while Structure 01 was occupied?).

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