Our project found a "mascot" in the last few days -- this young bird has adopted us. She has shown an exceptional interest in our work -- hopping in and out amongst the units and hanging out with the crew during lunch. While her interests may be purely archaeological, we suspect the numerous worms we're turning up in the excavations may be of greater interest. While I'm not certain, I think she may be a young female red-winged blackbird.

We continued our careful excavations of Feature 4 -- the large circular pit-structure. Below, Jennifer, Katie, Alex, and Lacey work on various units exposing the outline of this feature.

In their excavations of Feature 4, Lacey and Robin finally found a very clear outline of the pit on the south side -- the yellow arrow points from the outside (yellow/orange clay subsoil) while the blue arrow points from the inside (dark brown midden fill).

To the west, Erica worked on finishing one more "corner" of the pit feature -- the yellow line shows the boundary between the dark midden inside the pit and the clay subsoil outside the pit.

As the digging continues -- so does the paperwork and documentation. We are drawing and photographing the "profiles" of each excavation unit -- the side view that shows the different layers of soil. The photo below shows some of the different layers of soil over Feature 4. The area above the white line is the sod and plowzone. Below that are two more soil layers -- the dark soil between the yellow lines is the fill in the pit feature.

We also had some distinguished visitors today -- Dr. Jim Knight from the University of Alabama and Dr. George Lankford from Lyon College in Arkansas. In the photo below, Drs. Knight and Lankford (center) are observing Meagan and Jesse excavating the interior of the wall-trench.

Jim chipped in with some wheelbarrow runs for the students...

We greatly appreciated their input and thoughts on the excavations, features, and artifacts recovered so far this summer.

Some of the research faculty on our project also stopped by today -- below, Dr. Tanya Peres (Project Zooarchaeologist) and Dr. Shannon Hodge (Project Bioarchaeologist) discuss our progress with Emily.

Back up at the wall-trench structure, we continued opening new units to follow the walls of this structure. Below, Beth exposes another section of the north wall of the structure...

While on the south wall, Brandy, Natalie, and Richard finished up the unit opened by our alums yesterday. The south wall trench clearly continues (outlined in yellow) and contains two intriguing pieces of burned wood (noted by blue arrows).

Over our last few days, we will be working both slowly and quickly -- finishing up our detail work and paperwork on previously excavated areas and opening some new areas as quickly as possible. More on Friday...