Update on Wolf Village

Most of you know (because we are excited about it and shameless about self-promoting with the newspapers here) that the BYU archaeology field school spent another season at Wolf Village in Goshen, Utah. We had an awesome season there and got a lot done and will be heading back there for the 2013 field season (which is once again supposed to be the final season at Wolf Village... we'll see if it actually is).

This year we focused on finishing up excavating the large pitstructure (Structure 2) that we barely managed to trace the edges of the 2012 season. Last season it looked like this:

And by the end of this season, it looked like this (not the best photo, but it's surprisingly awkward to photograph giant structures):

Just for a little bit of scale, here's the entire field school just sitting around inside Structure 2:

And here's a plan map of the structure, including all the beams we recovered this year and the hundreds of postholes: 

Last year, we reported on here that Structure 2 was 71m2, but now it's even bigger and measures 75.6 m2! We're just a little excited about how gigantic it is. We're also really excited about the two antechambers/tunnels on the eastern and western sides. They're pretty much right in line with one another and almost exactly aligned east-to-west. Also, around the junctions with the main structure and the antechambers there are lines of postholes that we think might have formed part of deflector shields or screens of some kind to separate the areas. Dr. Allison thinks that the antechambers might have been used as entrances and/or exits from the structure. At the very end of the season (because that's how it always is, isn't it?) we found what we think might be an additional antechamber to the south. That's one of the things they'll be looking at next year.

Like Katie reported last season (for info on past seasons at Wolf Village see Katie's awesome summary at: http://fremontfarmers.blogspot.com/2011/08/friends-of-wolf-village.html), the midden above this structure was really interesting and totally packed with artifacts. We found at least 20 clay pipes, tons of olivella shell, gaming pieces, jar handles, and proj. points. Here's one of the really cool artifacts, it's a pair of cute little anthropomorph (we think) slate figurine things that fit back-to-back:

I don't have pictures of any of the other artifacts right now. This season we also tested at a few areas and found at least one more pithouse, but we didn't fully excavate anything and focused the majority of our efforts on getting Structure 2 done so we wouldn't have to un-backfill the entire structure. 

As of right now, our interpretation of this structure is that it's a large communal structure (because really, what else would something this large and weird be?) but we don't really have that many ideas about it's function. At GBAC next week, Dr. Allison, Scott, and I are presenting a paper talking about communal architecture and we've found out that oversized pithouses like this occur at a lot more sites than we thought (okay... only at like 5 sites, but before excavating this one we didn't even think there were any) and we're proposing that, along with the central structures which Rich defines and talks about in the Clear Creek report (aka the bible), oversized pithouses are another type of communal structure used by the Fremont. 

Sorry, I know this is a really quick gloss over what we did this season but if anyone has questions or needs clarifications on things let either me or Katie know. The preliminary report should be finished by Christmas and we've finally gotten a paper on Wolf Village architecture written (we're presenting a shortened version at GBAC if anyone is interested in hearing it) so more Wolf Village publications should be out soon, making it easier to get information on it. Yay for Fremont archaeology!