Post 4. Fieldwork Begins

The early stages of the fieldwork began with a careful combination of manual and mechanical excavation to re-expose the stone foundations of the Danial Rutan House. In this effort, Hunter Research exposed a roughly 30-foot-square area of the house’s interior footprint, removing approximately 2 to 2.5 feet of fill and most notably a deep deposit of dense stone rubble. Mechanical excavation ceased when the archaeological staff determined it had reached the last of this fill deposit after which the archaeologists laid out a series of excavation units within the house foundation to test the basement floor.

At the same time, archaeologists began excavation units placed along the south and southeast edges of the foundation. In these units, Hunter Research discovered a dry-laid stone foundation for a small southern addition to the house. The foundation overlay a buried historic ground surface that produced a wide range of artifacts including 18^th-century ceramic and glass vessel fragments. It also produced a fragment of a Native American projectile point.