After a brief interlude in our "field house" cleaning artifacts with rain in the morning, we moved back into the field excavations. With only a few days left in our project, we will be spending most of our time dealing with what we already have opened up -- not any new excavation units. The pace of discovery of things to investigate has been fast and furious for the past three weeks -- the rest of our brief project will be dedicated to figuring out what we've already found. We've already opened almost 770 square feet of excavation units -- and found much more than we anticipated. As we continued work on our "chimney base," the picture became more complex today. We discovered two sets of paired posts on each side of the feature (see photo below outlined in yellow) that will need to be investigated tomorrow. And, towards the left of the figure, we seem to have a deeper feature. The large hole at the lower left is the posthole for the modern fencepost we removed a couple of weeks ago.
Viewed from atop our handy giant ladder, you can get some sense of the complexities of what we have already investigated -- and what we still have to look at.
In other excavation areas, we continue to find new postholes, pits and other features to investigate.
Our investigations today continue to produce new artifacts that convince us we are in an area that was a residence in the mid 1800s -- probably a slave cabin. The photo below shows a medicine bottle fragment, two buttons, and two ceramic marbles...
And the one below shows a fragment of glass tableware decorated with a floral pattern, a medicine bottle fragment, another saucer or plate fragment with a "maker's mark" and four buttons.
Our evidence converges to support our belief that we are investigating a slave residential area -- more to come in the next few days as we work on investigating the many various features that we have already found. And -- more to come in the weeks to come as we identify, evaluate and investigate the many thousands of artifacts.