Although the day started off a bit cooler than usual and was overcast, there was virtually no breeze and the humidity was a bit sweltering in the early morning hours.
As we finish out our second week of fieldwork, we are faced with some interesting discoveries -- and some perplexing lack of discoveries.
We continue to find ample evidence of the presence of our Mississippian folks in every unit -- fragments of pottery are showing up in just about all of our excavation areas.
We also continue to find projectile points (dart and arrow points) from as much as 4000 or 5000 years ago.
While the artifacts are interesting, our main interests are in understanding the plan and layout of this prehistoric community around A.D. 1200. That means finding different areas of the site -- the main residential area, the public areas, and so on. Our work so far this summer has produced some interesting possibilities -- but also some intriguing challenges. Several of our excavation units have produced very little evidence of posts, pits, trenches, or other features associated with houses or activity areas. For example, the two units below show almost no evidence of past human activity (except for those recent plowscars from the 1920s or so).
The absence of these features is important -- it tells us that these excavation areas are not in a place where houses were built. Our questions now are -- what was this part of this ancient town used for? Hopefully, our investigations in the next three weeks will provide some answers.
Just a few meters to the west, we continued to work our way down to the possible house floor. The first photo below shows the dark soil within the possible house in four of our excavation units (about a 20 foot wide section). The second photo highlights what we think might be the outlines of the house in yellow -- and a possible hearth or fireplace in blue. More investigations on Saturday will perhaps clarify this picture a bit.
After lunch, we continued work for about an hour -- but then some dark clouds began blowing in and I decided we should close up our field operations.
When storms threaten, we move into our field laboratory to wash up artifacts from our excavations. As things turned out, the rain passed to the north and south of us -- but we did manage to get a significant number of artifacts washed up.
Here, Matt, Ellen-Craig, Brady, and John wash up artifacts from last week's digs.
We will continue our story tomorrow with our second volunteer day -- unless we are rained out!