Fortunately or not, each evening our excavation units are "colonized" by a variety of critters. Yesterday, two mice had built homes in our excavations -- this morning, three had established temporary residency. Below, field assistant Chris Hogan assists one of squatters in a relocation to another part of the property.

Later in the day, we startled another resident of the Sam Davis property by digging him up -- the photo to the left below shows a large and healthy mole in rapid motion; the photo to the right shows him in a bucket being transported to another location on the property.

Every day is a new adventure in "wildlife recognition."

But, let's get to "archaeology." As students continued to work on excavation units, Chris Hogan and I conducted a survey in the cotton field east of our current work area to try to establish the extent of the archaeological deposits. Using a metal detector, we systematically flagged the "hits" (while carefully avoiding damage to the young cotton plants). The photo below shows a section of the flags between the cotton rows -- our current Structure 1 is outlined in yellow in the background to the west.

We aren't diggng up artifacts in this process -- we are using the metal detector to establish densities of metal objects (mostly nails) to help locate where our suspected two rows of four cabins are located. The photo below (looking north) shows the area of greatest artifact density in the yellow oval -- easily large enough to hold two rows of four cabins. The yellow arrow points towards our current excavation area across the treeline.

Excavations also continued on the chimney/hearth base of Structure 1. As shown in the photograph below, the square feature is becoming more clearly defined and outlined as we excavate deeper. After this photo was taken, we began excavation of the unit containing the fourth corner of this square -- hopefully, we will have the entire feature exposed by Thursday afternoon.

During the course of excavations, we also discovered another "modern feature" of the Sam Davis Home -- an abandoned water line for a sprinkler system. Installation of this system a couple or three decades ago had disturbed and destroyed part of Structure 1 -- underlining the great care and caution that must be used when disturbing the landscape of any historic home. Hopefully, our work will provide the Sam Davis Home with additional information about areas that should be avoided in future planned projects.

This afternoon, we also opened several new excavation units to the south -- in a search for the second row of cabins. While the early results are promising, our first discoveries continue to confirm the ca. 1970s fenceline that parallels the modern fence. The posts we have found so far are outlined in yellow.

At the close of each day, we also have to "spray down" many of the excavation units. During the day, our excavation areas dry out -- making it difficult to see postholes and other features. Spraying them down with water before covering them with plastic for the night help to "re-hydrate" the soils for examination and excavation in the morning.

As we continue to expand our excavations -- we also continue to expand our understanding of the many activities that have taken place in this part of the Sam Davis Home landscape over the 150+ years. As a result, we are increasingly able to sort out 1980s waterlines and 1970s fencelines from postholes and features that were created in the 1850s. We have to be able to sort the older from the newer before excavating deeper -- we now begin to think we have a good "feel" for which of the features we are discovering belong to the older residences for which we search. As our understanding expands, the pace of our discoveries will also increase. We have broken "new ground" and started to understand it -- now we will proceed with finding the "old ground" and learn to understand it as well.