Feature #1 - Earth Oven

When digging in the units we create, we find many different types of features in the soil.  We can see this from the way the texture or the color of the soil is different from the surrounding soil.  Much of the features we find are usually very circular because we encounter trash pits (yes, we get to fiddle around with centuries-old dirt, which I will create a different post about), post holes for houses which seldom have anything in them, and earth ovens.  We are able to tell that the feature is an earth oven because there is burnt clay that is orange in color, which make the walls of the oven.  Charcoal fills a majority of the pit, and at the bottom are river rocks from the river the Fort Ancient Indians used for flint-knapping as well as for lining the bottom of the earth oven for placing coals and timber over in order to cook.  We found a huge chunk of wood at the bottom of the pit this year, which is a wonderful organic element we can use to analyze more about past environments and ways of manipulating the earth for purposes like cooking.  When we find earth ovens, we are able to find a lot of charcoal that we save and use for dating.  This is crucial for obvious reasons since we want to get the dates correct and even the specific time period during which these ovens were in use.  It is also very neat for us because we get to see how deep in the ground we have to get to before finding the feature (which allows us to see how high/low the ground used to be centuries ago) and it also allows us to see the usefulness of more ancient tools when digging into the cement-hard ground.  And let me tell you - this ground was like concrete for the first 2 and a half weeks. It was near  impossible to get through the sediment quickly, so if these Native Americans were able to dig more efficiently than us, well then I applaud them.