A Peek into a French House

           Hello everyone, it's Joey again. Even as the end of a field school draws near, great and exciting finds are often revealed. In fact, one of the greatest finds this year was recovered on the Tuesday before we were supposed to pack up, our second to last day to work in our units. On that day, in the unit North 23 East 9, Diana and I began to uncover strange soil patterns in the south half of our unit as we were trying to level it out at 50 cmbd. We were soon told to excavate around it, and for good reason, as we found that it was lining up nearly perpendicular with another soil formation in the north half and both went nearly as straight as an arrow. Surrounding this strange and unnatural soil formation, we also found large pieces of charcoal and pockets of ash, yet strangely no signs of oxidized (burnt) soil, and the opposite had been encountered in a previous unit to the west. 

            This indeed piqued the interest of our supervisors, who soon declared that we had found feature 28, the corner of a three-hundred-year old French house! Finally, after a month and a half of excavations we had found the architectural remains we were hoping to. We could scarcely contain our excitement. Wasting little time, we soon began taking samples from various areas of the unit, including carbon 14 samples of the two great charcoal chunks in hopes of dating them with fairly accurate precision and to determine what species of trees they came from. After accomplishing that, we attempted to take a float sample from the area that had the greatest concentration of charcoal to try to find other organic remains but were unable to accomplish this as we were pressed for time. To our joy, we found two possible post holes only a half centimeter from this concentration and thus further excavation there was stopped in an attempt to preserve them for further study in future years.

This photograph depicts the feature very well.

            Another interesting part of our feature was that it lined up in a nearly perfect line with a line of B horizon fill (the B horizon soil is usually found below the soil present during the fort’s occupation) in North 20 East 3 that was also being excavated this year. We believed that this showed that there was once a ditch that had been dug here in the 1700’s. The line between feature 28 and this possible ditch only serves to further reinforce this theory.

            Finally, on our very last day of excavations we uncovered a chain of either a necklace or bracelet inside our feature that was still clasped. This was indeed a rare find as no other intact jewelry chain has been recovered at the Fort so far. Now as we wrap up lab work back at WMU, I deeply hope that further work and study is put into this feature in later years.