This past Friday, May 6^th, marked the second to last fieldwork session for our archaeology class.  After almost six weeks of work on the Water Lot, it was finally time to move to the North Lot.  In the morning session, almost every student opened a new STP in the North Lot while a few students finished up the STP’s that lined the shoreline on the Water Lot.

Those students in both the morning and afternoon sessions who worked on the Water Lot  took cores of the STP’s that lined the old shoreline in hopes of identifying similarities in the soil levels and soil types.  Christine Canaday and Clay Strickland both worked on two of these holes.  Clay identified a layer of clay in his STP.  Hopefully this next Friday Christine will find a layer of clay and see a more continuous pattern develop and find out what, if any, ‘story’ the shoreline has to tell us.

Also on the Water Lot, Chelsea Cox continued digging in our most exciting STP S152.5 E25.  In the afternoon, Chelsea reached level 17 and identified another feature.  Within the feature she found a few pieces of shell, but the feature turned out to be less than one inch deep.  After photographing and documenting the new feature the day had already come to a close.  This STP has presented our class with the most material to work with and gives the clearest picture of what it was used for and how the people of the time lived.  Next Friday, Chelsea in the afternoon and Brielle Hayward in the morning, will dig as much as they can of this STP before our time runs out for the semester and with any luck find even more interesting artifacts and features.

In the North Lot, Darcy Depetris began working on one of the GPR anomalies situated on what would have been the outside corner of the building structure.  In her STP, Darcy found some interesting transferware pottery in level two.  At another STP, Rebecca Cruz found a broken piece of a bottle with lettering on it.  Rebecca will hopefully be able to date and identify this piece of bottle.

After beginning work on the North Lot, most students have realized that artifacts are being uncovered at much earlier layers than on the Water Lot and there are more artifacts overall.   In addition, the soil is much different than the Water Lot and easier to dig in.  From our digging this Friday, it looks like the North Lot has a lot to offer and next Friday should prove to be even more productive.