Wednesday started off as what we might call "humidity challenging" for archaeology. It's hard to get the day off to a good start when things are already steaming at 7:30.

In the early morning hours, crews completed exposing the eastern half of the north wall of the church.

The crew working on the northwest corner met with some disappointment today -- we were trying to open the smallest possible excavation unit to hit the corner of the foundation. We missed it by about two inches in that unit, and will have to start a new excavation to the south to expose the corner.

The crew searching for the second posthole for the church fence got deep enough to expose an intriguing cluster of limestone and brick that looks promising to be that very posthole -- if so, the fence posts were eight feet apart.

The crew searching for the interior features started removing the brick rubble from their units, but no clear patterns have emerged that would suggest interior features yet.

The crew working to locate the south wall continued their work -- still not quite deep enough -- although quite a bit of limestone fragments that are probably part of the foundation were exposed today.

Unfortunately, we had very little time to work in the field today. Mother Nature sent the showers our way about 10:30. We broke for an early lunch about 11:15. By noon, the storms were starting to blow in, and we were forced to close up.

We retreated to the MTSU campus and washed artifacts until 3:30 pm.

While most of our artifacts are probably mostly of interest only to the archaeologist, a few interesting items do appear in the lab. From the upper mixed zone of older and newer artifacts, we recovered a corroded bottlecap with enough surviving paint to read "Ski". Not being familiar with a soda called "Ski," I did a quick search and discovered that in April 1937, Edward Meier opened the Excel Bottling Company in a small town in southern Illinois -- making Ski soda, which is not marketed very far outside Clinton County. How a bottle of Ski soda made its way from southern Illinois to the Old City Cemetery in Murfreesboro gives us a chance to create some entertaining speculative stories -- and ask some interesting questions as well.

Here's hoping that the journal entry for June 12 will include fewer mentions of rain and some better progress on our investigations.