Stay tuned for Days 15-16 and our seasonal epilogue

DAY 14 • WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6, 2007

What a great day!

In Unit 5, Caroline and Will have completely articulated the chimney fall and an adjacent feature. This will give us a place to begin next season as we expand the area to delineate the hearth and orient the house. After they expend fastidious effort drawing and documenting the architecture, Anna and Dusty shoot about 200 points with the total station to construct a three-dimensional computer model of the collapse.

Will Cauthorn and Caroline Reid measure and sketch the profile section of Unit 5.

In Unit 1, Tracy has discovered another posthole bookending the square with its twin (discovered last week). We are closer to determining the nature and size of the superstructure that once resided here. In Unit 7, Anna discovers another posthole paralleling the one in Unit 3. The original two posts must relate to the cellar’s superstructure, perhaps framing the opening.

The real find was in Unit 3, where Morgan discovered the brick floor lining the bottom of the cellar. The orientation of the bricks is perfectly aligned with the ornamental flora, suggesting that we have probably hypothesized the house’s orientation correctly.

Morgan Pittman discovers the brick floor!

Voila! Unit 3 completed!

After Morgan’s discovery, the pressure is on in Unit 2, where Caroline and Blake hurry to find the continuation of those bricks.

Dusty breaks ground in Unit 8, looking for the cellar’s last corner.

DAY 13 • TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 2007

At Holcombe 1, the plantation site, the crew is now literally waist-deep in the cellar. We appear to have situated the corner of Units 2 and 3 directly over the center of the feature. Leaving 15-cm balks between each unit permits us to reconstruct the stratigraphic profile of each square, and by extension (we hope) the depositional history of the entire feature. This will help us date the layers of fill.

Looking South, we see Unit 3 in the bottom right and Unit 2 in the upper left. The rectangular cellar is oriented diagonally Northeast/Southwest through the corner of these squares. We have decided to open two new squares, Units 7 and 8, to complete the quadrangle and expose as much of the cellar as possible.

We get lucky. In Unit 3, the artifacts have started to dry up, replaced by a thick deposit of mud and loosely packed clay. Below the mud is a layer of sand. Was the sand brought here or is it a natural, geogenic part of the landscape? Since we have not reached the bottom of the cellar yet, this suggests an occupation gap between the original construction/abandonment of the cellar and its reuse as a garbage dump with the 1890s artifacts. The mud fill looks like an organic deposition, rather than a human contribution. So the cellar is evidently decades older than its final cache of artifacts might have suggested. We are pleased with this result, because we had hoped to associate the feature with the original 1840s manor house. Time will tell.

Unit 3 has produced evidence suggesting an organic deposition of fill material in the cellar following an abandonment.

Below a thick layer of mud and clay is an intriguing layer of sand.

In the middle of the cellar, artifacts stick out of the balk into Unit 2. In the lower left, a piece of porcelain or stoneware. In the upper right is an iron piece resembling part of a stovetop. At the bottom is an intact iron hoe blade.

Back at the lab…

Guy Weaver, Avery Pribila and Morgan Pittman conduct the daily artifact reading.

Blake Martin enters the artifact inventory into the searchable database.

Artifact trays drying on the rack.

Results of a rough sort.

Inscribed and marked pottery are significant aids for dating archaeological contexts.

The gang at artifact washing.

Cailin Meyer and Marcus Moreland scrubbing pottery and what-not.

Dusty Long and Caroline Reid process the flotation samples to filter out the botanical remains.

DAY 12 • MONDAY, JUNE 4, 2007

Moderate rainfall over the weekend made the roads to the burial mounds all but impassable, so the entire crew piled into trucks and braved the swampy mud roads to Woodstock. Along the way, a trio of Ames cowboys was attempting to relocate a herd of Black Angus cattle from the pasture abutting the excavation site. Our caravan of trucks stopped in front of a herd of enormous bovine pedestrians crossing the road. Jamie Evans trusted only his 4×4 truck to make it across the pasture now caked in mud. We left behind Milton and Guy’s trucks, shouldered the portable equipment and hoofed it the rest of the distance to the site.

The site is not pretty. The cellar and many other squares are filled with water despite (and in some cases, because of) the plastic tarps we use to cover them at the end of each work day. A bucket brigade line quickly forms and inside of twenty minutes, the water is mostly gone and digging can continue.

We opened a new square today with the hopes of clarifying the entirety of the house’s cellar. Near the chimney fall, a new feature has appeared perhaps with carbonized remains. After this feature is clarified, we intend to cover the square until next season, when we will expose the hearth.

Anna Inman and Dusty Long continued to retrieve satellite data on the outer contours of the copse in which the manor house is situated. This will help us establish the location of the house site a little better relative to the aerial photographs from the 1940s and 1950s.

What a day for artifacts! In addition to the ever-growing collection of metal and ceramic objects, four notable finds surfaced today: an arrowhead from the Archaic Period, a child’s gaming piece, a complete ring with the gem intact, and a glorious button with inlaid gold.

In the afternoon, the students traveled to the cemetery of the Ingram family, one of the first settlers to establish sizable plantation holdings in Hardeman County in the early nineteenth century. Dan Allen, a specialist in cemetery restoration, instructed students in the fine art of mortuary archaeology and burial conservation.

Archaeologist Dan Allen introduces students to the discipline of mortuary conservation.

Dan Allen demonstrates tricks of the trade. “I like to use various tools, like gravity,” he says.

DAY 11 • FRIDAY, JUNE 1, 2007

Today is a short day, because the Mid-South Archaeological Society is holding its conference at the University of Memphis tomorrow, and Ryan Byrne, Milton Moreland, Guy Weaver, Anna Inman, Natalie Palmer, Andrew Mickelson and Katherine Mickelson are all giving papers. The students are happy to start the free weekend a little early, but not before we put in some hard work.

The cellar continues to produce lovely artifacts: stoneware, glassware, decorated porcelain, and an assortment of bizarre metal objects. Jay, Cailin, Lindsay, and Hannah are doing a fantastic job clarifying the extent of the deposition.

In Unit 1, Guy Weaver determines that the burnt feature is for certain a posthole descending into the earth for about a foot. This is evidence of a fence or other superstructure above. The puzzling objects from the detritus include what seems to be a trunk latch.

Meanwhile, Ethan and Tracy return to the scene of Monday’s forest reconnaissance to locate the missing road junction that delineates the western border of the Woodstock plantation. They returned successful with GPS coordinates for the rediscovered road.