Not a bad day in the field today -- continuing work on the Mississippian midden in the east units and the still enigmatic limestone rubble feature in the west. Brief report for today -- a couple of interesting artifact discoveries. First, a nice fragment of a sandstone metate or grinding stone -- no big enough to really talk about what was being ground in it, but likely used to process seeds. Since it came from the Mississippian midden, a reasonable supposition would be that it was used to grind maize into cornmeal.
A more intriguing find in some ways is a small bead. While there's a small chance it could be an historic glass bead, it seems far more likely for several reasons that it is a prehistoric fluorite bead dating to the Mississippian era. We have substantial evidence from earlier excavations that Mississippian peoples were producing fluorite jewelry at the site -- this would be our first evidence of bead production. We will have to test the elemental composition in the lab to ultimately resolve the question -- but cool nonetheless.
John, our main on-site handyman, was busy today. Here, he's doing some careful wardrobe modifications for one of his fellow students.
Later in the day, major repairs to one of the pop-up tents that self-destructed earlier in the week -- scavenging spare parts from the other identical one that also self-destructed. Several hundred nuts and bolts later, returned to a reasonable facsimile of usable (for now).
A late morning visit by staff of the Tennessee Division of Archaeology -- Aaron Deter-Wolf, Paige Silcox, and Sarah Levithol Eckhardt.
Tomorrow is the first of our three "Volunteer Saturdays" -- we expect a fair number of tourists and a few folks wanting to try their hands helping the students with digging and screening.