We continued working our way through the plowzone in most of our units today, so we don't have much "exciting" to report for today.

One interesting historical feature that showed up today was a series of soil discolorations produced by a "subsoiler" or chisel plow. The first photo below shows these features -- the second shows them highlighted in yellow.

Our mysterious "Feature 98" from yesterday also turned out to be a pair of these disturbances created by a plow. From our conversations with relatives, we feel fairly certain that Mr. Shoulders never used a subsoiler on the farm. So, we looked for possible other explanations for these features. Our best guess at this point is that when the drainage system for the field was installed in around 1920, these deep cuts were made in the field to divert water towards the trunk pipes.

We also continued work on our posthole from yesterday -- in the photo below we have excavated a small area to show the complete profile of the post. The first photo below is a "side view" of the darker soil filling the post. The second highlights the outline in yellow.

As several crews closed out their current units, we moved them to another location in the field to the south -- where we found a large garbage deposit back in summer 2007.

On Friday, weather permitting, we will begin excavations of the wall-trench house discovered earlier in the week.