When Emily and I arrived a little before 7:00 this morning, the crew was already up and about. Well before 8:00, we had the equipment unloaded and the excavation units uncovered and ready for excavation. As we prepared to start our work, a flock of geese honked their way across the field...
The crew continued their hard work from yesterday -- despite the rising heat and humidity throughout the day. As we neared the bottom of the plowzone today, fragments of animal bone, ceramics, and lithics began to appear.
The plowzone gave us time to practice some needed skills -- measuring and recording information.
As we neared the bottom of the plowzone, a number of possible features of interest also began to emerge. The drought conditions have made the soil at the site extremely dry -- difficult to dig and very difficult for us to find the evidence of ancient postholes, pits, trenches, and other things of interest.
However, one very obvious large feature appeared in two of our excavation units -- a large amorphous shaped feature...
This feature is almost identical on the "top" to the large post pits excavated last year just to the west of where we are now working.
These posts were what we thought were the center posts for a wall trench structure...
With the appearance of this new possible set of posts aligned very closely with those excavated last year, we decided to take a second look at the southeast corner unit. We weren't satisfied last year that we had fully investigated all the features in that excavation area -- so Jesse, Larry, Renee and Teresa spent the afternoon digging back down to the plastic we placed last year. We'll take a second look here on Friday.
At this point, it seems at least possible that our wall trench structure from last year may be significantly larger than we thought -- and have a series of central support posts. Similar structures at Moundville had three central support posts in a row in very large wall-trench buildings like that shown below (Image courtesy Jim Knight).
More news tomorrow.