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.

The Invisible Pit Feature

Another last day surprise was the discovery of another large concentration of pottery--while cross-sectioning a post mold! Usually this doesn't happen, since you can't cram many pot sherds into a tiny post mold. It does happen, however, when the post mold is within a previously unidentified pit feature. This was the case with Feature 11-52 shown below.



Michelle N. spent all the remaining day exposing one pot sherd after another in a necessary hurry. Her careful and efficient efforts revealed a large concentration of sherds sitting in a small basin. I assisted with the final removal using my trusted long-handled trowel (no pictures permitted!). The vessel came out in a minimum of fragments and quick examination revealed it to be a plain-surfaced vessel, somewhat rare in our Woodland assemblages found to date.

I find all these busted vessels in small pits quite interesting. I suspect that we will not find all the pieces to any of these pots, which would seem to suggest that these are places of disposal rather than storage. But we need to remember that more than 100 years of plowing at this site very likely removed significant portions of the upper sections of these vessels. In fact, we tend to recover a lot of base sherds and few rim sherds, which seems to support a view of these features as small "pot pits"(not to be confused with "post pits"). Some historic Native American households were known to place storage vessels within shallow pits dug into the floors of their dwellings. This practice would have been most practical with large storage pots, which are less amenable to suspension on the walls or from rafters. We won't be able to confirm this, however, until the laborious washing and inventorying are underway, and we see what parts of the original vessels have survived.

Some Final Day Surprises

Every season interesting things tend to be found on the last day of excavation. This year was no exception. The finishing touches were put on the excavation of the large pit Feature 11-39 by Allison Z. and Marcia R. At the very bottom they discovered a large post mold, similar in form to the two "post pits" found last season and Feature 11-37, just 1.5 meters to the southeast. As with the last feature, it wasn't until all the fill had been removed from 11-39 that three-quarters of a circular cavity was detected at the very base of the pit. Note the steeply inclined sides of this pit and large post "hole" in the image below.


As with the other post pits, this deep, funnel shape seems impractical for use as a storage facility or cooking pit. Our crew did find additional fragments of at least one vessel in the fill (see below), but the artifact content was rather meager.


No, I think these features are the locations where large posts were set up and then taken down. It seems likely that the pit itself was the result of the removal of the post, since no clear mold of an in situ post was apparent in the cross-section of the feature. Only the very end of the post was visible as it protruded beneath the surrounding pit and protruded into the subsoil. As will be discussed in a future post, this particular prehistoric post may have supported a large structure. More on that later.