Sometimes when we work on the island in November we examine possible locations for the February field school, but this year we already have a location in mind (stay tuned in February for more on that, or look at vlogs/blogs from earlier this year). Instead we returned to the site of Te Mataku for the fourth time in the hopes of figuring out the stratigraphic sequence of features. This time we wanted to open a wider area to understand how the different features fit together with the ultimate aim of understanding how the site was used. We spent a lot of time going back over out previous notes, section drawings, and the spatial data in GIS to help us stratigise the placement of the trench.
Previous excavations revealed a number of large ovens with thousands of broken and complete heat retainer stones, probably for cooking and lots of animal bone. At the end of the season in June we found a row of post holes, but no clear indication of what they might relate to. This week we wanted to figure out their function and how they relate to the fire features found previously.
Post holes mid-excavation
Crossection of heat retainer oven