Wingos and Cows

At Wingos the resident cows (a mother and a baby) have been having fun with the units while we are gone. Features like the ones in this photo became a common sight after uncovering a unit in progress on a Monday morning!

This Friday was intended to be the last day of work at Wingos. As events turned out, it is not the end. We were cleaning out our last 5x5 foot unit for the season, ER 382, and turned up a feature that extended along the southern floor of the unit. This was not so surprising, because there was a large rock situated within the feature, which can be an indicator of buildings in the immediate vicinity. What really surprised us was a darker patch of redder dirt that appeared underneath cutting into subsoil as we cleaned out the feature. Alas, it seemed to run under the wall so we could not really tell what it might be. With the end of the workday approaching, those of us staying on to work at Indian Camp next week opened up a small unit to the south to try to solve the mystery of this new feature. The mystery remains unsolved, so Monday a skeleton crew will return to further open up the unit to the south. Thus far, all past features we have seen in the plowzone this season have been pegged as plow scars, tree roots, burned tree roots, or just inexplicable patches. We hope that this feature in ER 382 may be something substantial and eventually explicable!

The plowzone in the last 2 weeks at Wingos has yielded several sherds of colonoware, one sherd of Westerwald stoneware, two copper buttons, several fragments of clay pipes, lots of wrought nails, and many more prehistoric lithics and debitage. The colonoware was exciting to find, as we had not seen any all season. Both sherds actually came from the same unit with the unknown feature, ER 382, that took up so much of the full crew's last Friday together. There was definitely activity occurring in that area. Perhaps even another building footprint? We can hope…