It is not quite square and does not quite match the dimensions of a normal soldier pit. We are testing the area south of where the utility trench cut through, so roughly the bottom third of the above shape.
At one point, we thought we had solved the mystery of the hole I excavated yesterday. It looked a lot like a postmold (the area where a wooden post has rotted) but it was offset on the top of the feature and there was no associated post hole. Well, we believed today that we had found the post hole when an area of grayish clay showed up about 18" down, looking for all the world like it really wanted to belong to that darker hole fill. You can see the lighter clay in the bottom left corner of this photo:
The best way to see if a feature really is a feature is to keep excavating - if the soil stain remains it is a feature, but if it changes or disappears altogether it was just coincidence. Lo and behold, we had a really bizarre coincidence here, because that change in soil coloration petered out after about an inch. Had it been a post hole associated with the postmold, it would have continued at least to the bottom level of the hole.
So we can be pretty sure that whatever that intrusive hole was, it was probably not a postmold. We know, from the associated artifacts (trade beads, copper scraps, suspected brigandine armor pieces) that that hole was dug and filled in pretty early. Unfortunately, much of it was lost to the utility trenching in the 1930's, so we will probably never know the exact reason it was dug.
We also know that the entire feature is pretty early. There are very, very few historic artifacts in the fill, but there are lots of lithic flakes, fish scales, and fragments of Virginia Indian pottery. In the first few months that the colonists were here, that would have been the only type of artifact lying around that would have gotten mixed in with the fill, as the colonists would not have been here long enough to deposit a lot of material culture yet (unlike in the later years of the fort where by some accounts there was trash lying all over the place.) That in itself makes this a crazy-exciting feature to dig!!!
After troweling for a large part of the day, I dutifully took my turn water screening - and of course, while I was away they found another clue to our wonky feature. Troweling down, they came onto another layer of fill that was uniformly dark and loose, instead of the mottled clay we had been seeing most of the day. At the same time, the east side wall cut in sharply and bottomed out. It is hard to see the curvature of the bottom in this photo, but you can clearly see the abrupt change from dark, loamy soil to solid orange clay.
Our mystery feature is now a little less of a mystery - the dark area exactly matches the dimensions of similar features (soldier pits?) The east wall bows out because at some point someone dug in sideways toward the edge of the darker fill. That would probably help to explain the strange light fill over in that area that we thought might be a posthole. Unfortunately, with so much disturbance in this area from the utility trench, the fill was very hard to read as we troweled down through it.
I was disappointed that they figured out so much about our feature in the 45 minutes or so that I'd been water screening outside the fort walls. At the same time, I had a cool little discovery of my own. While screening some fill from Mary Anna's boundary ditch (right next door to our feature!) I found something that looked for all the world like a round rock. However, it had clearly been modified - incised around the equator, as it were.
I took it to Dave, who got about as excited as I've seen him so far. He said it was a Virginia Indian artifact - a piece of sandstone carved and incised to be used as a weight on a fishing net. How cool is that?!?!?
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