Day 12: Back in the Field Again, Multiplying Postholes!

Crew member Janet Donlin wrote about her exciting day:

"Hey everyone! Today we headed back out to Market Master’s House after a week of processing artifacts in the lab. We still have four open units that we have to finish and we hope to be done by Thursday so it looks like we have our work cut out for us. The good news is that Mike and I have almost finished our second unit, Test Unit 7. Today was pretty exciting because we found our first legitimate features! We found what originally looked to be two post holes, but two turned in to three as we dug them out. Feature B was a very square and rather shallow post hole near the southeastern corner of our unit, and just above it to the north was Feature C. As we dug out Feature C, we found that it was actually two post holes (and their post molds) that were right next to each other. We guess that one was dug originally and then another was dug right next to it as the first fell into disrepair. In them we found some nails, a couple pieces of glass, and a few early 19th-century ceramics, like ironstone and pearlware. What the post holes were doing there is still open to debate. Since the soil on the west side of our unit was a little different from what was on the east (where the post holes were), we thought that maybe they were put in as part of a structure that was located in our unit, the soil on the west being the interior and the east being the exterior. However, we haven’t found very many artifacts to prove this, and like all archaeology there is a lot of conjecture involved. Still, our three post holes were pretty cool finds!"

Here is a picure of the two features. The one being excavated is Feature B. The one to the left of it is the double posthole, Feature C.

The second photo shows a detail of Feature C showing the two dark round stains representing the remains of posts and the outline of the holes dug before placing them in the ground. The one on the left was placed after the one on the right. Artifacts recovered from the soil affirm this interpretation.