Paul on being in the field...

Tuesday (June 30th) was an eventful day for the Texas field school excavation. Beverly, Danny and I continued working in unit 8, which had a large tree in the center of it. The combination of tree roots, large limestone rocks, and hard soil made the process slow and tedious. We were forced to the tree. We then opened up a new context (15) to account for the pedestal that contained the tree’s roots and base. This context spanned through three different contexts including 2, 8 & 13. We dislodged the earth from the root system using pick axes and screening the dirt was a little difficult. We encountered a large concentration of rocks within the unit and seemed purposefully laid out, however, it seems to have just been the method in which we removed other rocks in the unit as we excavated that resulted in our own visible pattern. We uncovered a strange and interesting iron artifact. Its level of oxidation made it hard to identify but appears to be a chain with iron bolts or eye pins. The artifact was cleaned up in situ and photographed. This marked the ending of our day and the whole crew cleaned up the loose ends and called it a day. All in all a successful day, providing us with more questions to ponder about the time, space, place, and reason for this strange feature.

By
Paul Flynn