Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Pottery Everywhere
It has been a busy fall as we work away on the Heckleman site collection. As our faithful readers know, we recovered quite a bit of ceramics last summer. Intern Catie G. spent three weeks reconstructing and measuring one particularly large vessel from Feature 11-09. Here she is working diligently on her project.
This was the vessel from the "pottery cascade" described in an earlier blog posting (6/24/11). Contrary to our hopes in the field, this vessel was not complete, but Catie was able to reconstruct a decent portion of this large, thick pot. It had at least two thick lug handles which were attached around the shoulder area and a distinctive fabric-marked exterior surface. Unfortunately, we recovered no datable material from Feature 11-09, so we cannot say exactly how old this vessel is. I would suspect it dates to the Early Woodland period, perhaps 2,000 or more years ago, based on its form.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
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.
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.
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