Work continued on our large pit feature (Feature 51). The upper zone of ash, charcoal and other artifacts does appear to represent a dumping episode rather than use of the pit for a fire -- there are no signs of direct burning. We will hope to finish this feature up on Tuesday morning.

Our cleanup work on Friday and Saturday paid off this morning -- after some careful troweling and inspection of the units, the wall trenches were much more easily defined. Using some lime green flagging tape, we marked the clearly identified trenches for photography today. The photograph below is taken from the northwest corner of the structure looking towards the southeast. At this point, we have four clearly defined wall trenches associated with the west wall, four with the north wall, three (or four) with the east wall, and one on the south wall.

Given the consistency of rebuilding episodes, we took a closer look at the south wall today -- it appears that we overlooked some wall trenches last year during our excavations. Now that we have a better idea of what to look for (and how to make them a bit more visible), we identified three more possible wall trenches on the south wall today (shown below in blue). We'll clean these units up again on Tuesday and try to confirm these suspicions.

Our excavations of sections of each wall trench continued today (and will continue throughout the week). We are gathering some very important information on how the structure was built. On the west wall, we continued to document how the final version of this structure was constructed -- the photograph below shows a section of the trench excavated today.

The trench itself is fairly wide -- but the part of the trench holding the small posts is relatively narrow. As highlighted below, the posts were placed in a much narrower section of the trench, with hard packed clay on the outside. In the photo below, the entire width of the trench is outlined in yellow, with the narrower portion outlined in blue.

Out on the far periphery, one of our crews continued examining our new "ditch" feature. Work is proceeding slowly here -- the feature is filled with limestone, large fragments of pottery, animal bones, and other artifacts. We'll continue work in this area on Tuesday.

About 1:30 pm or so, the clouds in the distance started to form up in some ominous patterns. Given the nature of the weather in Middle Tennessee in June, we can't close up our excavations every time a dark cloud appears on the horizon or a brief shower passes over. But, we have to watch the skies continually when potentially dangerous weather threatens (and listen to my weather radio). After ten years in the fields of Castalian Springs in June, I have a fairly good handle on whether the approaching clouds are threatening, how fast they are moving, and whether we should close up our excavations or not (I understand this is now called the "Dr. Smith Doppler Weather Radar"). By 2:00 pm, the skies were dark on the horizon with too much lightning (then about 3-4 miles away) for us to remain out in the field safely. For the safety of the students -- we moved to our nearby field lab to wash artifacts.

As it turned out, we didn't get any rain until about 3:30 pm -- and then only a brief shower. The thunderstorms passed a mile or so north of us. I'll expect to make these same safety calls for the rest of the week given the forecast.But, there's always work to be done in the lab. We worked on washing some of the many bags of artifacts already recovered this season.

As shown in this newly washed tray of artifacts -- we've recovered several thousand artifacts already. This tray is filled with fragments of pottery, stone tools, animal bones, and (yep, you guessed it) some rocks as well.

Now that we've gotten many of our wall trenches defined -- we'll hopefully be excavating sections of several of those on Tuesday and throughout the rest of the week.