Angel Mounds 2012 Field School

Week Five (June 6th- June 13th)- By Hannah Bose, Gary Macadeag, and Corinne Schultz

Hello! This is our last student installment for the 2012 Angel Field School blog. The field season has gone by so quickly! In addition to this week's update, a second blog detailing the geophysical coring work has been posted. As always, I hope you enjoy.

Week five has turned out to be quite eventful! We started coring Mound F with Dr. Monaghan, made significant progress in the trench, and found some very exciting artifacts at water screening.

Feature 10, a soil zone in unit 8 associated with the palisade, has revealed itself to be more than we expected. The feature was originally thought to be a single palisade, but soil changes within the feature lead us to believe it actually two palisades, one a rebuild on top of the other. Even more interesting is the fact that the postholes we found inside it are much smaller than expected, meaning the Mississippian people of Angel were probably using much smaller trees to build the palisade. There is some debate at the site as to whether these postholes we are finding are characteristic of all post holes within the 2 kilometer long palisade wall. Some speculate that there are larger postholes at other places within the wall.

We are digging our 1x1 units down quickly, and have closed out half of the twelve. This means we have reached soil containing no cultural material, which we call sterile soil or the B-horizon. Between the closed out units and the low elevation levels of the remaining ones, we are seeing some wonderful profile views. We are clean-scraping the walls to get a nice fresh face so we can map and draw them. This is a time consuming process, but the resulting diagrams are rewarding. These maps help us put our individual levels in their respective 1 x 1 sub-units into the bigger context of the unit as a whole. Excavations have produced many exciting artifacts this week, including about 30 bone needles, over 100 clay beads, and a partial burnt corncob. The corncob was especially interesting because it was well preserved and is very different in size than the corn we are familiar with today. In addition, because corn grows annually, it will be very useful for dating.

Outside the trench, Dr. Bill Monaghan is surveying through the use of a total station to find the locations of the Indiana University Field School barracks and laboratory from the 1940s. In addition, Dr. Monaghan is taking cores from Mound F and Mound H. The process of coring, as described in detail in last week’s blog post, is new to most of us at field school. The cores from Mound F were fairly illustrative and are covered in the next blog entry. Dr. Monaghan and some students took cores from Mound H to see if there are any cultural remains. If there is not, then this would suggest that Mound H may not be a man built mound at all. Upon questioning, Dr. Monaghan stated that the results were "inconclusive." In other words, the Mound H cores did not yield any cultural activity. But, as Dr. Monaghan likes to say, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”

More photos!