Week 7: February 28 (by Sami)

This week at field school we had beautiful weather. It was a cool day, but the sun was shining so the site was mostly kept at a warm temperature. There had not been much rain the previous week, so removing the tarp from the unit was a mostly easy task. We had coffee today, so that kept people in high spirits!

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Lelia, Laura and I continued work in Unit 15. Our task today was to finish removing level 2, the transition between the first and second plow zone. We used a shovel to remove most of the dirt and it was easy to tell where we needed to stop because the base color of the dirt was significantly darker and we could see plow scars. The digging was slow going due to the number of roots, large and small that run through the unit. There are so many roots because of a tree that had to be cut down at the beginning of starting this unit. The stump is still present in the unit and sits 13.5 cm into the north wall of it. The large roots from the tree have been our constant foe while digging in Unit 15, but despite the slow pace we were finally able to get to the bottom layer. Throughout the removal of level 2 we were constantly screening the soil through a ¼” screen to check for artifacts. We found a lot of small pieces of quartz, some fire cracked rock, and a few pieces of pottery.


Once we reached the bottom of level 2, we cleaned up the unit by removing all remaining loose dirt with trowels and making the unit floor level. This was so that we could clearly see the plow scars. We recorded the soil color of the base layer and then then two other colors, one that was slightly lighter and caused by the plow, and an even lighter one from roots.

Scraping the floor of Unit 15 at the base of Level 2.

After recording everything we needed. We began to remove the soil from level 3. The goal is to get the floor of our unit level with the floor of Unit 12 so that we can excavate a feature that is in both units. To start we filled out the form for the excavation and then created a bag for artifacts screened. We did not get very far into level three, but we did find a lot of fire cracked rock and stamped pottery, which was very exciting!

A piece of Mississippian age complicated stamped pottery from Level 3 of Unit 15.