As our excavations proceeded today, the artifacts were better preserved -- we are now below the area disturbed by the plow over the past 200 years. The photo below shows a handful of pottery sherds...

We are also finding some tantalizing hints of folks that occupied the landscape earlier than our Mississippian peoples -- the pottery fragment illustrated below is tempered with limestone and marked on the surface with cords. This is a hallmark of peoples who occupied the Tennessee landscape a century or two earlier (around A.D. 800-1000).

As a field training course for budding archaeologists, we continued to instruct our students on various aspects of "doing" professional archaeology. Below, Eric (one of our experienced crew chiefs) explains to students how to draw profiles of excavation units.

Students are also learning to take notes constantly as a record of our work. Below Jolene takes a break to update her notes.

And, as many of our current excavation units have provided artifacts -- but not complex features like houses -- we also began laying out a series of new excavation units for next week.

Saturday will be the first of our four volunteer days at Castalian Springs. We look forward to a great day of working with interested members of the public on our project on these days.