Quick Site/New Sector Update

Hi all!

Since the last post, we have been trying to chase out the brick floor, in the hopes of finding material to date it with, and any walls or other structural remains associated with the brick floor.

Well, we may be on the right track! Today we opened Test Unit 20, about 1om East of Test Unit 19 (featured in the last post) in an area where we found brick AND roof tile fragments on the surface. We were hoping to hit an intact wall abutting the brick floor, but we got something close: a collapsed wall overlaying the brick floor feature! (see pic, and video below).

Feature 15 Brick Floor in Test Unit 20 with possible wall fall on top.

We are pretty excited about this, as it indicates we are getting near the remains of the structure abutting the brick floor. In addition, Walter’s father, who worked on the farm a few decades ago and brought this site sector to our attention, mentioned that when they found the remains of this building during farm work, the walls were made of stone underneath brick. The wall collapse appears to be mainly brick on the bottom with stone on the top, indicating the remains of a wall made of, you guessed it, stone on the bottom and brick on the top!

We also FINALLY hit on some cultural material associated with the brick floor, in this case a small concentration of ceramics in the NE corner of TU 20 (directly beneath some of the wall fall rubble). The ceramics -while only a few and quite fragmentary- appear to be early colonial types, indicating that the site is from the early colonial period and thus potentially an earlier site component than what we have been excavating further to the north. This is all very preliminary at this point, but it is quite exciting that we are getting closer! Tomorrow we will open a test unit directly to the North of TU 20 in order to seek out the base of the wall that appears to have collapsed onto the brick floor in TU 20.

Will update as soon as something new turns up! Thanks for reading!