Last week, Amanda and her team completed their western “rock pit” unit. Today, under duress from Crew Chief Maddie and her trowel, Devon, JP, and Nicolas joined the “completed unit” team. They finished up their unit just before Dan, Sarah, and Aaron from the Tennessee Division of Archaeology arrived for a site tour and to check on our progress. Dan, a historic archaeologist and MTSU graduate, was excited about all of the historic artifacts and features that we’ve been finding.
As hardly any artifacts were recovered from Maddie’s unit, her crew was happy to return to the Mississippian midden 100 yards to the east. Their unit was temporarily abandoned last week when they hit the water table. Almost immediately upon returning, they recovered a fabric-impressed saltpan sherd and made everyone jealous.
In the center of the field, Amanda’s group was hard at work recovering a mix of historic and prehistoric artifacts. These included a broken stone knife…
a handful of historic pottery sherds...
and a piece of furniture hardware.
They are just below the plow zone and are taking it slow to see if they can find any historic features.