Once again, we really couldn't ask for better "digging weather" in late June. We continue to retrieve an amazing assemblage of broken pottery -- although perhaps not visually stunning, each of these pieces will be carefully analyzed in the lab and used to interpret the daily lives of the people who occupied this town. We are the first to see and touch these objects in about 900 years.
As we finished recording the information in several of our excavation units, we backfilled them. Here, Matt, Brittany, Jaime, and Jolene load the wheelbarrows in preparation.
Unfortunately for us and the local farmers, we are in a bit of a dry spell in Castalian Springs. Although it has rained quite a bit elsewhere in Sumner County, we haven't had much rain here at the site. As a result, we have to spray down some of our drier units in order to see the different soil colors. Below, I'm using a water sprayer to carefully "re-hydrate" four of our excavation units.
After a spritz of water, the different soil colors are much more visible -- the lighter clay does not retain moisture well while the more organically enriched soil absorbs the water and the darker brown stands out.
At this point, a couple of probable circular pits are visible -- along with an irregular feature that may be an erosion gully, ditch, or trench filled with trash.
To the west, our possible wall trench house turned out to be something entirely different -- a series of overlapping pits or basins. Before investigating them further, we excavated a large historic period posthole (Feature 105) that had intruded into one of these pits -- the large round posthole contained fragments of a late 1950s or early 1960s Nehi bottle. It probably is part of a fenceline.
Over at Mound A, our excavations revealed a row of postholes about a meter deep.
Below, the postholes are highlighted in yellow. These appear to represent part of a structure that stood on an earlier version of the Mound. We will excavate these on Friday.
Currently, our mound unit shows three probable building stages of the mound.
These are highlighted below in blue and yellow. Interestingly enough, all three of these stages are "flat" -- no signs of the construction of the large conical mound are yet visible. This tells us that the earliest construction of the mound was a large flat-topped platform -- and that the conical mound was a later addition. If our preliminary interpretations are correct, each stage of the mound was capped with a layer of light yellow-brown clay. The five postholes originate at the yellow line shown below.
