Week Six – Nikki Silva

Hi Everyone!

My name is Nikki Silva and I am a 5th year PhD Student at MSU. We had our final day of fieldwork today and are heading back to Michigan tomorrow. Thankfully, we finished all areas in both Structure 26 and Structure 34. It was a great field season!

For the past 4 summers, I have excavated at the site in many different roles, including Research Assistant (2013), Field School Teaching Assistant (2014), and Field Supervisor for the Taste of Archaeology Camp (2015). This summer I was interested in pursuing some of my own research, which focuses on how cultural interaction affects community organization and the use of space and will focus primarily on Morton Village as a case study. I’m interested in analyzing multiple scales of settlement and community patterns including the structure of households and the organization of activities at the village.

Excavating during summer 2015.
Excavating during summer 2015.

After discussing my research interests with Dr. O’Gorman we decided that the best way to investigate household structure at the site would be to use multiple sampling strategies to investigate the domestic structures themselves and the spaces around them. Using data collected in 2012 from a partially excavated structure (26) and based on the magnetometry survey, we decided to continue excavation of STR26 and also investigate a cluster of four possible structures nearby. We decided to completely expose the rest of STR26 and open up two-meter by two-meter test squares on the corners of these nearby possible structures. We only had enough time during this field season to open two of these smaller units (SQ125 and 126) on the two possible structures closest to STR26, but had planned to have pits on the corners of the two others and put test trenches between all of the structures to investigate the areas outside of the house.

Here you can see STR26 in blue and the cluster of four possible structures in white.
Here you can see STR26 in blue and the cluster of four possible structures in white.

The goal of this sampling strategy was to see what kind of data we could gather from opening up an entire domestic structure compared to the data obtained from placing a smaller unit over a corner of a structure. Unfortunately the two possible structures next to STR26 (where we placed our units) are unlikely actual structures; SQ125 had multiple pits including a deep storage pit (F328), but may have had a shallow basin at some point and SQ126 also may have been a structure as we found a possible wall trench, but this is still unclear. However, both of these test squares gave me valuable information on how space was used around the domestic structure. STR26 proved to be an informative and exciting domestic structure as it burned down while people still lived there. We completely excavated the structure and gathered data about how space was used inside, which will be beneficial to my dissertation research and to the whole Morton Village Archaeological Project. I am excited to start analyzing the spatial data from the structure and the two test squares; this structure will be an important part of my multiscalar spatial analysis of the Morton Village site.

Inside STR26 on the last day of fieldwork.
Inside STR26 on the last day of fieldwork.

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