Village Stockades and a Possible House

We are back in the lab now and starting to sort through our discoveries. Brian S. has spent much time this week tabulating post mold data. We recorded 477 of the things this season! As mentioned in a recent post, the stockade lines are the most obvious post mold configurations and clearly extend to the northeast as a set of shallow arcs as shown in the map below. Post line "D" is a new one. It either represents a third stockade line outside the first two (A and B) or possibly a structure (bastion?) attached to line B.


Post line C, located just inside A, was first identified last season as a straight line of very small post molds, each measuring only 3 to 5 cm in diameter. Our work this season in unit 514N 512 E exposed what appears to be a right angle or turn to the northeast in this line, which is interrupted in part by Feature 11-46. I spent several hours one day tracing this line toward the northeast corner of the unit, when it abruptly turned to the southeast and out of the eastern wall of the unit. As shown in the diagram, this configuration looks like the squared-off end of a structure, possibly a longhouse-like dwelling measuring about four meters in width. Similar post configurations were found by us back in 1998 and 2002 at the White Fort village site in Lorain County. The latter structures dated to the Late Prehistoric period, around AD 1300. So we may have found our first Late Prehistoric period house at the Heckleman site. As usual, only more excavation will tell for sure.