Early this morning, we noticed a killdeer had set up house in our field -- she probably has a nest out there somewhere.

Our crews worked on several different sets of features today -- labelled in the photograph below A-E: (A) north wall trench near the northwest corner; (B) the big pit to the east of our wall trench structure; (C) a newly discovered south wall trench near the southwest corner; (D) the stone-filled feature near the center of our structure; and (E) several overlapping wall trenches near the center of the east wall of our structure.

At (A) -- we excavated the postholes within the wall trench...

At (B) -- we finished up the major part of Feature 51 -- the big pit. However, a deeper sub-pit appeared in the bottom (the darker circular stain near the center of the pit). We'll work on that on Wednesday.

During the day, we discovered a wandering visitor -- a Monarch Butterfly caterpillar. We took it over to the nearby milkweed patch -- it's favorite food.

On the south wall -- we continued looking for some of our "missing" trenches. We think we have found all four of the trenches for the south wall now. Excavations started on one of them -- below Erik is getting the trench ready for formal photographs (note the dark posthole stains in the trench).

After cleanup, the postholes showed up nicely.

We'll continue excavations on this trench on Wednesday -- and start work on sections of the other two suspected south wall trenches as well.

At (D) -- we excavated what appeared from the surface to be a posthole later filled in the top with rocks.

I was a little concerned about this feature from the beginning -- packing a posthole with rocks after the post is filled is not a typical Native American practice in our region. It is, however, a very typical historic period Euroamerican practice. Upon excavation, we remain uncertain about this particular feature -- it does appear to be a posthole, but it is squared off and flat bottomed. At this point, my guess is that it might be part of a fenceline from the 19th or 20th centuries. We'll have to evaluate this one further in the lab and think about it.

At (E), we started exploring the multiple wall trenches for the east wall. This part of the structure is the most complex and confusing -- at the end of the day, we think we have figured it out a bit. The four trenches appear to all overlap on this wall -- we have at least three lines of postholes (photos on Wednesday!). We did excavate several interesting items from these trenches today -- including the flint arrowpoint shown below.

On my way out of the site this afternoon, I caught this deer jumping the fence...

More news tomorrow.