Today was the day we got to map out the brick rubble left behind from what we hope might be the old trading post that still calls this place home. First, we looked at the landscape to see the planned outline of the upland area where the three brick rubble areas reside. We looked for the angles of the edges where the upland sloped down to meet the normal surface level.
Chris and Jess grabbed the tape measures and began to run along the rivets with it to measure the distance of the entire upland mound. We only had two of the long tape measures, so the Chris and Jess ran the first line at a slightly west north, 348 degrees, all the way down to the southern endpoint. It came out to be 16.5 meters long. Then they ran the second tape perpendicular to the first line, which read 7.5 meters. Everyone began to use their folding meter sticks to help measure the rest of the upland.
Before we created our accurate sketches, we decided to use straight lines to get a firm grasp of the angles and measurements of the upland. After accomplishing that goal, we went back and created accurate grooves and curves of this upland; also included in the sketches were accurate representations of tree placement on the upland and precise measurements of the brick rubble.
With the first map finished, we split into three groups to draw a larger scale and more detailed map of the brick rubble piles. Meghan, Chris, and Jess worked on the northernmost rubble pile A and Lindsey and Allison worked on the eastern brick rubble pile B. Julie and I mapped the southern brick rubble we knowingly dubbed C. We were the only team to finish ours due to the fact that our rubble didn’t have many visible bricks.
After lunch, we all went into the lab and went to work on classifying and separating more sherds of pottery. It helped that we had a guest speaker today, Christopher Judge, who knew so much information on Native American pottery in the South Carolina region. He said that this region was a convergence zone of the three surrounding pottery craftsmanship areas. Mr. Judge gave us a lecture on the different types of pottery in diachronic order and gave sketches, descriptions, and the patterns of each type of pottery and how it was made during each time period. We had a break following the lecture (because we crush Dr. Ward and Dr. Dillian’s expectations for the day).
Our last checkmark for today’s agenda was another lecture given to us by Christopher Judge. He told us about the history of Winyah Bay and the rivers that flow into it, the artifacts that we might find when surveying Bull and Sandy Islands, and his work in the Cheraw area of South Carolina and his digs to find the Kolb house and the prehistoric site there. He was really great, fun and very knowledgeable in his fields of study. We were lucky to have him.