We started our third week of this summer project this morning -- a humid and hot morning and early afternoon. Then, the clouds moved in with a breeze for the last hour or so of the day.
In the early morning when we arrived around 7:15 am, the local barn swallows had adopted our backdirt pile
Today, we continued excavations on several new units -- before we can really investigate our wall-trench house, we need to finish a couple of additional units down to the floor level. In another area started on Saturday (the garbage deposit), we also missed the main feature with our first two units -- and need to expose a bit more of this area with two new units before starting a more detailed examination. Today, we also started our small exploration into Mound 2-- the large platform mound at the heart of this ancient community.
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This mound was not a burial mound -- it was built as a platform to support a building (probably the house for the chief and his/her family along with perhaps the community temple or shrine). Our goal with this small excavation is to see if we can find the garbage discarded at the back of the mound by the family that served as the leaders of this ancient Middle Tennessee town.
Elsewhere on the site, we continued to investigate several possible human-created features. In one location, the feature turned out to be a natural geological feature -- a section of bedrock that had not weathered to clay.
Among the artifacts recovered during the day was a very nice T-shaped drill -- this came from the plowzone above the wall-trench house.
