Another beautiful June today. In most of our seven excavation units, we worked through the plowzone today and began to find fragments of ancient pottery along with a few animal bones (mostly from white-tailed deer). In the photo below, the objects to the left and above the arrow are relatively large fragments of shell-tempered pottery vessels discarded some 800 years ago by native inhabitants. While not very photogenic at this point, they are representative of the types of objects most commonly found by archaeologists -- broken and discarded objects that we use to reconstruct the lifeways of the prehistoric inhabitants of the state. Thus far, most of the pottery is poorly preserved and very fragile -- but we have hopes that as excavations proceed on Friday, we will find better preserved specimens.
Included in this "midden" -- an accumulation of trash over several decades -- are increasingly larger fragments of charred wood and other plants. These objects provide valuable opportunities to examine the environment around Castalian Springs almost a millenium ago -- and a chance to acquire radiocarbon dates for the associated artifacts.
In one of the excavations units, a complicated set of different colored soils was uncovered towards the end of the day -- including light colored dense clays, gravel deposits, and silty alluvial soils. At this point, we aren't quite certain what to make of this -- we will explore it further on Friday.
More news on Friday!