Field efforts this year focused on testing at a site known as Blue Spring Midden B (8VO43), an aboriginal shell midden situated beneath the nineteenth-century Thursby House at Blue Spring State Park.  Impending repairs to the foundation piers of the house required assessment of potential impacts.  Park officials asked us to assist in this effort, offering in-kind resources, such as use of cabins at Hontoon Island, in exchange for field school services.  Although famed archaeologist Jeffries Wyman stayed at the Thursby House in the 1870s while testing sites in the area, little was known about the age, extent, and depth of the deposits beneath the house.  We aimed to gather such information.
Field school students excavated two 2x2-m test units along the drip line of the house, one on the north side, another on the south side.  Stratified shell midden consisting primarily of Viviparus spp. extended a full 1.5 m in each of the units.   Plain fiber-tempered pottery of the fourth-millennium B.P. Orange Culture was recovered in the upper half of the sequence.  The presumed preceramic strata of the lower half contained no diagnostic artifacts, although vertebrate faunal remains were plentiful throughout, and three large marine shell tools were located near the bottom of one unit.  All levels were removed in 10-cm levels and matrix passed through 1/4-inch waterscreens.  Subsistence columns 50x50 cm in plan were removed for flotation and 1/8-inch waterscreening.
	The stratigraphic sequence of Test Unit 2 (north side of house) revealed a series of stacked shell and ash deposits.  Each of the depositional units was about 1 to 2 meters in plan, indicative perhaps of discrete burning and dumping episodes.  Each of the shell strata varied in the density, condition, and surrounding matrix of shell, although all seemed to have involved burning, presumably in situ.  Sufficient charcoal is available to date each of the units.  Two samples were submitted to Beta Analytic in early August.  Click here to check results.

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