We took a brief trip up to the hilltop overlooking the site to get some semi-aerial photographs of our excavations. The green expanse is the area where we're working this year -- you can see most of our excavations covered with plastic near the treeline in the distance.

On the circuitous drive through the fields to get to the hilltop, we passed our "tom turkey" from day before yesterday and a beautiful doe -- neither of them waited for me to get my camera ready before darting into the high grass and trees. Both are a reminder, however, of the tremendous value of this 132-acres not only for archaeology -- but also for the wildlife that will find refuge here as houses and subdivisions spring up seemingly overnight along US 25.

In our westernmost units, we continued to investigate the series of features discovered last week. The "feature" is a very large apparently square or rectangular pit excavated by the native inhabitants of this town hundreds of years ago. Although we haven't fully exposed the feature yet, it appears to be about 4.5 meters east-west (about 14 feet) and possibly around the same north-south. The photograph below shows an exploratory excavation into the feature. The yellow line running from left to right is the top of feature in our excavations. The yellow arrows show where the feature extends into other excavation units. The blue line to the right of the photograph is the edge of the feature -- hard clay subsoil.

Later in the day, we continued excavations in this exploratory cross-section -- revealing the bottom of the feature. It has been fairly heavily burned (the yellow arrows point to the exposed orange-red fired bottom of the pit). This may well prove to be a spectacular discovery as the next few days proceed.

To the north and east, some of our new excavation areas produced some truly intriguing sets of features -- a giant set of postholes, trenches, and other features that we will be investigating over the next couple of days. The photograph below shows one of these units -- the yellow lines outline an extremely well defined trench -- this is either a segment of the palisade line that we've been searching for or a very wide wall trench for a house occupied by prehistoric peoples almost one thousand years ago. The areas outlined in blue appear to be part of a house wall -- probably a wall trench house. The segment at the bottom of the photograph appears to be a wall trench -- while the upper circles are postholes. While preliminary, I suspect that the wall trench has been partially destroyed by plowing -- a bit of it is preserved, but elsewhere only the postholes in the bottom of the trench remain. The white circles are another series of postholes probably representing part of a house wall. On large native towns occupied for several centuries, we often find that houses have been built and then rebuilt on the same location one or more times. The pattern of posts that formed the walls can sometimes be difficult to sort out -- but in this case, it looks fairly clearcut. We'll be expanding our excavations in this area to see if we can identify all of the walls for this house (and its multiple rebuildings) along with checking to see if our trench MIGHT be the palisade line.

Directly to the east of the excavation above -- but about ten cm higher (about 4 inches) -- the crew has already identified some probable features related to the house. The yellow circles are possible postholes -- the large size of two of these suggests they may be interior support posts for the house (which are usually two-three times as large as the wall posts). The area outlined in blue is the top of a larger feature that is "harder" and contains flecks of charcoal and pieces of burned clay. This is in a good place to be the hearth or "fire pit" in the center of the house. We will continue our investigations here as well on Thursday.

Only three and half more weeks to go on our project this summer -- we have already discovered that this ancient native town has many secrets preserved beneath the plowzone. We will uncover many important bits of information over the next few days and weeks -- thanks to the hard work of the students. We will also set the stage for future projects in the coming summers.

Finally, I will mention our appreciation for the many dozens of visitors that we've had to our project over the past week and a half -- we appreciate both the interest expressed by the citizens of Castalian Springs and the information they've shared about the property on which we're working and their lives in this community.

Keep checking back -- we will be reporting new discoveries every day in the field now!