Early Woodland Pottery from the Enclosure

By the close of week four, we had excavated a total of six meters of the enclosure trench. In each section, ceramics similar to Early Woodland Leimbach Cordmarked forms were found. These relatively thick, grit-tempered sherds with somewhat coarse cordmarking were found at all levels of the feature. The sherd shown below illustrates the flat-bottomed, "flower pot" shape typical of many Leimbach vessels.


Near the bottom of the trench we found a large body sherd (shown below) with a distinctive knob handle, also typical of Leimbach wares.

At the nearby Seaman's Fort site, similar sherds have been found in pit features dated between 500 and 100 B.C. Like the Heckleman site, Seaman's Fort was enclosed by two large ditch features but lacked the interior oval enclosure that we are now investigating.

Rare Artifacts From the Pit House

As work continued last week on the excavation of the pit structure (Fea. 09-04), some very interesting artifacts turned up. Near the floor level an area of carbonized plant material resembling bark was exposed. We were even more surprised when some of the fragments were removed to reveal two interesting objects laying side by side. One artifact is a well-made awl or perforating tool made from the scapula (shoulder blade) of a deer. As the image below shows, this tool is drilled at one end, possibly for the attachment of a cord. The other specimen is a piece of shell that has been fashioned to look like a bear claw. This artifact was decorated with three tiny punctates on both sides and perforated, most likely for attachment to clothing or to be worn as a pendant.


The discovery of these objects on the floor of the pit structure may indicate that they were lost by the inhabitants; however this seems unlikely. Instead, I think that they may have been deliberately left behind when the house was abandoned, perhaps as a spirit offering. Whatever the explanation, it is very exciting to discover artifacts that may very well have belonged to the people who lived in this pit house at least 600 years ago.

Digging the Enclosure Trench

In week three, we succeeded in exposing a small section of the trench that makes up the oval enclosure. This enclosure was identified in the magnetic survey and is tucked up into the northeastern corner of the site. The trench (Fea. 09-10) is about one meter wide, a little less than one meter deep, and is bordered by lines of post molds. The fill is clearly stratified with light and dark soil horizons as shown below.



In earlier posts, I explained our (mostly my) assumption that this enclosure represents the stockade line of a Late Prehistoric period village site. This was based on the oval shape which resembles a number of village sites in this region. So early this past week, we began to carefully cross-section Fea. 09-10 and recover its contents, all the while assuming that we would find late pottery types such as Parker Festooned, the type of pottery found in Feature 09-04, the pit house described in my last post. Of course, things don't always work out that nicely in archaeology.

As Mary Lou's fine crew carefully removed layer after layer of the ditch fill, they uncovered numerous rather thick, grit-tempered, cordmarked pot sherds which did not resemble the much thinner and well-made pottery of the Late Prehistoric period. The pottery they were finding more closely resembles Leimbach Cordmarked ceramics of the Early Woodland period. One large body sherd (shown below) has the distinctive flat bottom and curvilinear application of cordmarks that is typical of the Leimbach series. So far, we have found no Late Prehistoric


period ceramics or triangular points. We have exposed two other sections of this trench and will excavate their contents to see if this feature is truly older than we think. If so, then this enclosure is something much different than anything we have encountered before. But I won't get ahead of myself; we will wait to see what turns up this week. So stay tuned.