Our crews are working across a large portion of the southeastern corner of this ancient town. While we've moved a tremendous amount of dirt in only four weeks -- we've touched only a tiny part of the mysteries held beneath the surface.

Slow work continued on "Feature 4" today -- our large circular pit feature on the western edge of our excavations. Below, Robin carefully exposes a deer scapula while searching for the edge of this feature.

About six feet to the north of Robin, Jennifer, Lynne and Tracy are cleaning up another new excavation unit exposing the outline of Feature 4.

Once they finished their work, one more edge of the circular pit was clearly identified -- one more piece in the outline of the enigmatic but important feature.

Elsewhere, Jonathan and Barrett continued work mapping the several features in their unit. The features outlined in yellow are pits that were later filled with trash. The blue outline is a probable posthole to be mapped first and excavated later. The white outline is a small rodent burrow at the bottom of one of the trash pits.

Now and over the next few days, crew members are moving from area to area as needed to help with various recordkeeping tasks. Jennifer moved over to help Jonathan and Barrett finish mapping their features while her crewmates were busy with some tedious cleanup work.

Our work on the large wall-trench house continued -- we finished up another excavation unit to the north. The three trenches we had already identified continued all the way across this unit (shown in white, yellow, and blue). To our surprise, we also found yet another trench (in black) -- our wall-trench structure was not only large, it was rebuilt at least three times.

In addition, our large post continued to be an intriguing feature -- the photo below shows this features in cross-section. The yellow circle surrounds a large piece of intact post remaining in this feature.

In the late morning, some alums of the Castalian Springs Project dropped by to visit and volunteer. Mitch and Tyler were crew members last summer (and graduated recently). After receiving an orientation from Alex, Mitch, Tyler and Teresa opened a new excavation unit in search of the south wall of the wall-trench house.

We're at a tedious stage of work -- things will pick up as we get different areas cleaned up for larger scale photographs in the next few days.