When leaving a site, we have documentation and photographs of what we've done. However, it sometimes is easier to look at things on a digital level. Which is why we draft all of our drawings in AutoCAD to make it easier to put them together. The Aboriginal Locus is another example. Here is what the whole area looks like when all the plan views are put together. What we originally thought was a rectangular cellar is not so rectangular.
The shaded area is the rubble fill layer that was exposed first in Unit 5. We expanded the whole area to try and find the boundary of the fill layer and now with this drawing we can see where we would need to dig further to find the outline. Unit 7 shows the post hole and mold that was found. On the east side of Unit 26 is another possible post hole and mold. Obviously there was a building here and with what we know from the post mold feature in Unit 7, at one point it was a earthenfast building before a brick structure was built. Was that earlier building an Aboriginal dwelling that coincides with the Potomac Creek and Moyaone pottery found in the same units? This is a question I would love to know the answer to!
- Peter
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I am confident that what we have in this locus is a Colonial period earthfast building, represented by two or three postholes so far. The so-called cellar may be a series of intersecting borrow pits whence the builders got the clay loam with which they created and repaired a wattle and daub chimney and fireplace. Such features tend to be filled with very interesting and well-preserved trash.
The pits may have been dug after a building was abandoned if the borrow pits were excavated through existing postholes. We will have to reexpose the feature as well as expand the excavation so that we can take a good look at its outline and internal structure. Often, layers of fill within a large feature appear on the surface as concentric rings, the earliest defining the perimeter of the feature, the latest towards the center.
This area becomes increasingly interesting as we look at it more carefully.
Jim
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