Day 10 (by Katie)

It felt good to be back in the field after missing last week! Day 10 was a productive one that I spent working with DuVal and Rob excavating Unit 13, also known as the really cool wall of several features. 

DuVal and I started the day by mapping out Feature 4, which is a pit that is full of fire-cracked rock. Since it is right next to Feature 3, which may have been a nut roasting pit, it is possible that this spot was where people made lithic tools and ate snacks together. Here is DuVal scraping extra soil out of the feature to show the rocks in more detail.

As you can see, the feature is on the very edge of our unit, so unfortunately we could not excavate it in its entirety, as we would have to begin a new unit to do so. I spent the morning mapping the artifacts out as they sat in the soil on graph paper. The soil that Duval is removing from the feature was put safely into a bag as a flotation sample, in which it will be pumped and filtered through water to harvest very small items. This can include wood, bone, and charcoal. 

Most of our time in Unit 13 today was spent trowel scraping for artifacts, which we then plotted on our map of the unit. This method is done by taking a trowel, and removing the dirt in thin layers to reveal artifacts, and leaving them in their place to map them. Doing this method, Rob was able to find two different fragments of large Savannah River projectile points! This one is the lower half of one. You can see how large it is on the graph paper:

We also found a lot of flakes and small sherds (burned clay?) through screening the dirt removed from the Unit through a 1/4" screen. 

We finished up our day by taking the unit down to an even 140 centimeters below datum -- the base of level 7.  I'd consider this a day well spent!