Friday the 13th proved to be another nice day -- although the mix of heat and humidity at the end of a long week left everyone happy to close up at day's end!

The crew searching for the northwest corner of the church foundation completed their 1x1 meter square unit today -- including excavation of two features. We missed the foundation stones by a few inches, but did excavate the "builders trench" for the foundation -- the trench excavated to place the foundation stones. The excavated trench ends at the yellow arrow in the photograph below. The black and white arrow points at a 123.5 cm deep hole -- we originally thought this was a posthole at the corner of the church. But, after excavation, it seems more likely that it was the taproot for a large tree. The crew has started a new excavation unit that should reveal the corner on Monday.

Crews working on the southernmost excavation units on the inside of the church continued working their way through the 50-centimeter thick deposit of brick rubble, plaster, and mortar from the destruction of the church. After several days of dealing with this mish-mash of demolition debris, they finally exposed what appears to be part of the interior foundation wall for the east gallery. More on that Monday.

The crew working to find the south wall of the church continued excavating through the thick deposit of destruction debris -- and finally got down deep enough to reveal what appeared to be the trench for the foundation wall. On Monday, we'll hope to get down to the actual surviving coursework.

In the units started yesterday at the front (north) of the church, two crews continued working their way through Level 1 - the upper 10-centimeters of relatively recent deposition. More of the north foundation wall is emerging, but won't be added to our photographic report until Monday.

However, we did discover a fragment of a commemorative marker in one of those units -- barely covered by the grass.

The photo below shows the row of Revolutionary War markers as it appears today -- the yellow arrow shows the location of a missing stone. The stone was placed in the cemetery by the Captain William Lytle Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1937 -- it didn't mark an actual grave, but was just placed to commemorate this soldier, who is buried about three miles from downtown Murfreesboro near the National Cemetery. The stone vanished from the row of markers sometime between November 1968 and October 1976.

The missing marker was for Samuel Wilson who died 11 September 1830. In 1968, the marker was recorded by Jill Garrett as already broken and in bad shape --the fragment of marker found today only a few feet from its probable original location (see photo below) appears to be a fragment of the missing stone.

The fragment will be retrieved -- possibly additional fragments will be discovered as the excavations continue. If we have really great luck, maybe we will be able to find enough to piece some portion of this stone back together.

At the end of Week 2 of the FPC Archaeological Project, we have made some great progress in "re-discovering" the remains of the church. At right, the students are carefully covering the excavations for the weekend. Three weeks to go -- and many more discoveries await us. But for now, the Project Director is off for some "R&R."