Old Floor

Many years ago Nash Harbor was a village of a couple hundred people. They lived in semi-subterranean sod houses dug into the side of the hills. About a week ago we began clearing the grass around a rectangular depression that had been inhabited around fifty years prior. It is approximately thirty feet up the hill from our camp. The depression is roughly three yards wide, five yards long, and half a yard deep at some places. As soon as we began digging we made some interesting finds. They weren’t very valuable, but it was entertaining. We found things like old boots, fish nets, knives, marbles, bottles, arrowheads, batteries, mussel shells, barrels, and much, much more.

Yesterday, after digging through two to three feet of dirt, I came upon what looked like a rotten log. I removed the surrounding dirt to find a flat, wooden surface, most likely made of drift wood. Rick, our teacher, informed me that it was the floor of the ancient sod house. It may date back to the 1920’s. Right now we are in the process of completely uncovering the floor. It is going to be difficult because it probably spans across all of our digging squares. It was an important find because it proved that we are digging out a traditional house, and not just a food cache or other storage structure. By tomorrow we might be able to uncover the rest of the floor, but until then we can only keep digging.   –Doug

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Summer Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.