Our early morning arrival at the Castalian Springs site was greeted by a lovely fog creating a view of "Mounds in the Mist." Our excavations are visible at the left under our plastic -- with the main platform mound at the right.
The fog settling on the spiderwebs throughout the fields created a landscape filled with nature's architecture -- the photo below shows only one of the hundreds of amazing webs highlighted by the dew, fog, and early morning sun.
Unfortunately, while appreciating the mysterious vistas created by the morning fog, I also know that a nice Tennessee fog in June is an excellent indicator that your sweat glands will get a workout later.
We continued work in several excavation areas in the morning. Jesse, Meagan and Bekah opened a new unit to expose the rest of the deep and enigmatic pit feature excavated on Saturday.
Elsewhere, we completed excavations of a 2-meter long segment of the trench for the town palisade.
And, six meters to the north, we exposed what appears to be another 2-meter long segment of the palisade trench. While not very visible in this photograph, the "in person" view of it was fairly convincing as we closed up for today. We'll continue investigating it on Wednesday and hopefully will have a fuller report then!
We continued excavations in a couple of other units, but have nothing to report from there yet -- elsewhere on the site, our "digs" were delayed by waiting for the contents to dry from our leaks night before last.
Having moved an enormous amount of dirt in the past couple of weeks with good results, I decided we should take a little break from the field excavations this afternoon (particularly given that the 90+ degree heat was exceeded by the humidity level!).
We packed up our tools at lunchtime...
And moved over to our field laboratory after lunch to wash up some of the thousands of artifacts recovered from our excavations of the last two weeks.
The photograph belows shows part of the artifacts from a single "lot" or bag from our excavations. The artifacts includes dozens of fragments of pottery, stone tools and manufacturing debris, animal bones discarded from meals a thousand years ago -- and yes, a few rocks (well, they looked like they might be something important when they were covered with dirt). Our rule of thumb when excavating is -- "when in doubt, put it in the bag!"
We adjourned from our labwork at 3:30 today -- many of the crewmembers headed west to The Hermitage, Home of President Andrew Jackson to tour the summer archaeological excavations there and to hear a lecture on the last couple of years of excavations on the South Cabin. Mr. Daniel Brock, our guide and speaker for the evening, is currently the Archaeologist Supervisor at the Hermitage -- he is also an alum of our Castalian Springs Archaeological Project at Bledsoe's Fort (from 2001) and a graduate of our MTSU archaeology program. Our thanks to Dan for hosting our visit.
Our digs resume on Wednesday morning with good promise for some new and exciting discoveries -- the weather predictions this evening also offer a good promise that our sweat glands will get some solid exercise.
Check back tomorrow!