The crew at Arcadia had another great week, albeit a wet one. Despite one rain day and an afternoon closed early, the team is 80% done with our Phase I exploratory shovel testing. Almost all of our 50 shovel tests have been shot in using a Total Station or an optical transit.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood:
Kyle's clearing for the next total station shot allowed us to have a moment of
literary appreciation

The UWF Arcadia crew finished up our fence post survey in only 2 days; the information gathered from these extra shovel tests has helped us delineate high and medium probability areas.

Rylan and Matt finishing the last
shovel test of the fence post survey along the
 southern and eastern property boundaries

Next up, we'll be opening up larger units in areas that have been very productive thus far. So far, we have loosely bounded four general occupation areas: a barn or warehouse area, a agricultural zone, high status white owner's occupation, and the area of unidentified ethnicity, presumably low-status residents.

Otis the Owl, one of our more feral site visitors, who likes to survey students'
digging in one of our two very high probability areas on site.

We've also been preparing for the second phase of the field season: geophysical research. Shown is a georefrenced map depicting one of a series of GPR results just south of the hypothesized slave cabin remains and west of the 4 meter deep well.

As always, any anomalies found through geophysical research need to be ground-truthed. To do this, a series of larger units will be opened; this allows a larger glimpse into the ground to identify patterns of refuse disposal. Hopefully, the Arcadia crew will begin this type of excavations next week.

PI John Phillips with his take-home message

Last week was the first of four of our volunteer days, this Friday the 15^th will be our second running from 10 to 3 so come on out to visit the site and work with the artifacts!