As time passes, the student crews become more accustomed to the daily routine -- the photo below shows students hauling equipment from our storage area to our excavations.
Crews continued work finishing excavations of the fenceline units today... The photo below shows Mackenzie, Cheryl, Lesley, Andy, Michael and Tracy at work in that area...
In the area beneath "Cabin 1," another crew continued work... In the photo below, Pat, Lacey, John and volunteer Howie Brainerd continue work in that area...
Work continued today on the chimney base of Cabin 1. While I normally try to put students on excavation of features under supervision, I took this over today. This area is so disturbed by overlapping features from many different time periods that even with my twenty years of experience in excavation and interpretation -- it is a great challenge even for me to figure out what goes where and with what. The first task of the day was to excavate the rodent burrows -- from moles, rats, mice and others. Some of these are modern and some are "ancient." Those are shown outlined in blue below...
Among the most exciting discoveries, however, was a shallow "cellar" directly east of the chimney base. These small cellars are common in slave residences in the Middle Tennessee area and were accessed through trapdoors in the floors. This cellar (outlined in yellow below) originally had a limestone lining at the top -- a few of those stones are still in place. The "rodent burrows" (outlined in blue below) all lead to the cellar. We'll have more to report on this feature on Wednesday...
Later in the day, we continued to expand our "metal detector survey grid"...
And elsewhere on the site, we decided to open one more excavation unit to look at the original yard fence starting at the "overseer's office." In this area, we hope to clarify some of the several versions of the old yard fence... Tiffany, Ryan, Lauren, and Meagan worked on this today...
An artifact of interest recovered from this area today comes from the Daughters of the American Revolution -- the lapel pin or similar object shown below has the letter D A R in the stars at the left. And J.A.C. -- presumably a chapter of the DAR... We'll investigate this in the next few days...
Work continues tomorrow...