Mole Team

 Hi there! 

     It is Katy writing to you from unit S5W7! Cole and I have been busy at our unit this week as we continue to find a wide range of artifacts. With help from the middle school campers last week and the high school campers this week, we have made it to 30cmbd level all around. Getting to excavate in the floodplain has been an exciting experience for sure. Excavating in uncharted territory has led us to some potential answers about the size of Fort St. Joseph, which is our main goal for the 2022 field school season. In our unit, Cole and I have hypothesized that it could have been a potential structure, or place where the cooking was done based upon the variety of artifacts that have been found thus far. For example, we have been finding teeth both from deer and beaver, bone, calcined bone, pottery, redware, lead shot, hand wrought nails, lead, a possible kettle lug, seed beads both regular and tubular, along with a clear mulberry bead, a possible piece of a clay pipe stem, gunflint, a couple larger structural stones which have since been removed from the plow zone, and 18th century window and container glass. Getting to work with the campers these past two weeks has been great! They are all super eager to learn and excavate the units down in the floodplain. Some challenges that the campers and I ran into were having to dig around the structural stones and bioturbations within the entirety of our unit. We have a larger bioturbation in the N1/2 of the unit that goes down roughly 20cm. We also had some unusual soil changes that we were instructed to excavate around just in case it was a potential feature underneath. The soil went from a dark brown to a lighter yellowish color which was sandy in texture. Around 25cmbd was when we learned that the soil changes were not crucial to our unit, and they were dug through until our unit was level at 30cmbd. Our next goal is to excavate further and attempt to make it to the occupation zone by next week. Overall, Cole and I are having so much fun this field school season and are excited to see what else we can discover and reveal about Fort St. Joseph. Thank you for reading!

Katy Dreger