Most of our work today focused on finishing some on-going excavation units and starting some new ones... Early this morning, one of our excavation units in the area of our slave cabin looked like this... (note the two postholes outlined in yellow)...
By this afternoon, we had opened two additional 2-meter-square excavations units -- and identified yet another fenceline. The two yellow circles at the bottom of the photo are the same as shown above. This fenceline appears to be older -- and consists of cedar posts driven directly into the ground.
The photo below illustrates the location of this "new" fenceline -- the yellow rectangle shows the approximate location of the "chimney base." Work on Friday will hopefully confirm our hypothesis that this fenceline may be related to the "yard area" of Structure 1.
These two new excavation units also continue to yield large quantities of artifacts. Some of these shown below continue to convince us that we are working in an area where a slave cabin once stood (fragments of pottery, buttons, etc.)
But, we're also still getting a "mixed bag" of artifacts like those shown below -- including a lot of "farm related" equipment such as harness buckles, horseshoes, but also a broken marble and fragments of stoneware "crocks."
Another major project we started yesterday and continued today is a systematic metal dectector survey of the yard area. As the photograph below shows, we are gridding off the yard area in 2-meter-squares. We then systematically record the number of "hits" on a metal detector. We're not "digging" to see what these artifacts are -- just recording the "bleeps/square." This information is being plotted daily using computer software to generate information about the "density" of metal artifacts...
The image below shows a computer-generated "density map" of metal detector "hits" to date. For those not familiar with looking at "density maps" -- where the lines are closer together, there is a higher concentration of metal artifacts. The rectangles show the approximate locations of the existing four log cabins -- the highest density of metal corresponds with nails and other metal debris around these four cabins. The very high density at the top of the image is related to one of the cabins -- and the fenceline at the back of the yard area where garbage and debris piled up. The slight but continuous peak along the right side of the image is the current fenceline -- again where nails and other metal tends to accumulate. As we expand this survey over the next few days to other parts of the yard, we hope to see concentrations where no current buildings exist. This will provide clues to where buildings long since gone once stood.
Join us again on Friday for another update ...