A nice day for archaeology in Middle Tennessee -- a cooler and overcast morning. Although the day started with about 75% humidity -- it had dropped to about 50% by midday and continued with some nice clouds and a breeze through the rest of the afternoon. The threat of showers and/or an isolated thundershower continues for the rest of the week -- but really a small chance.
As a training course for budding archaeologists, we reached a point today where numerous "crews" stopped to take notes and record information as their excavations continued beneath the plow disturbed soils. Below, Grey takes notes on several interesting clusters of ceramic and animal bone in his unit.
Here, Eric, Nemanja and Natasha experiment with our new mapping frame -- recording the locations and depths of several large pieces of limestone. Even though these fragments are in the plowzone, we record their locations with maps and photography before removing them. In some cases, they may be the disturbed "top" of important things that lie beneath.
Later in the day, we started preparing several more units for excavation -- here, two crews strip the sod from two new areas in preparation for excavation on Wednesday.
In our westernmost unit, John, Kendra, and Brady cleaned up their excavations at 50 cm below the surface -- showing the relatively clear outlines of two overlapping pits filled with trash. The photograph below shows the cleaned up unit.
The photo below highlights the two pit features in yellow -- we can distinguish the undisturbed yellow brown clay from the darker artifact filled pits readily.
We also were visited by a swarm of several dozen blue butterflies -- they were interested in the damp soil beneath our water coolers.
of greatest interest to us was the discovery of a wall-trench for a house occupied some 8 centuries ago. These houses were constructed by excavating a trench -- the wall posts were then set in these trenches. Although we have only exposed a small portion of the wall of the house thus far -- it promises to be a major area of work for the next week or two. The photo below shows a small portion of the wall trench excavated.
The photograph below shows the trench highlighted in yellow. If you go back and look at the photo above, you should be able to pick out the dark soil that allows us to "see" this trench.
More news tomorrow!