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Foster

Site ID: 15Da68

Farmstead
Daviess
Kentucky Archaeological Survey (from the Collection of the William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology)
Unless specified, we cannot provide site location information.

Summary

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The three-acre Foster site sits on a terrace overlooking the Green River near its confluence with the Ohio River.  University of Kentucky archaeologists investigated the site in the early 1990s prior to the expansion of a nearby coal mine.​​ They documented the remains of a wall-trench house and a nearby bell-shaped storage pit.

The wall-trench house originally measured 16 by 15 feet. However, residents rebuilt its western wall, thereby enlarging the house to 16 x 17 feet.  

The upper diameter of the storage pit measured 2 feet, but due to its bell-like shape, it expanded to a diameter of 4.5 feet at the bottom. This produced a storage pit enclosing 61 cubic feet.  Ancient Indigenous people would have stored dried corn kernals and other plant foods in it for later use.​

Archaeologists documenting the wall-trench house.

Findings

​Yankeetown people lived near the mouth of the Wabash River during the Late Woodland/Mississippian period. They were the residents of the Foster site. 

They produced distinctive, well made, and well-fired pottery. Their smoothed and, less commonly, cordmarked jars were tempered with grog (crushed fired clay). But what really distinguished these people's pottery from that of their ancestors, and from that of their descendants, too, was how they decorated their jars. 

Common vessel forms were jars, bowls, and sometimes, pans.  Large vessels had lugs or loop-shaped handles.  

Other diagnostic artifacts from Foster included triangular arrowheads; abraders, celts, and hammerstones; beads and human figurines made from pottery; and disks and pendants made from cannel coal (a kind of carvable, hard, smooth coal).​ 

​The ancient Native people who lived at this house grew corn, goosefoot, maygrass, and little barley in nearby agricultural fields.  They also collected hickory nuts, pecans, walnuts, and acorns, and several types of fruits, including grapes, blueberries, and raspberries  They ate deer, raccoon, beaver, gray squirrel, opossum, bird, turtle, snake, and fish. 

Yankeetown Triangular arrowheads.

What's Cool?

​Distinctive Ceramic Decoration

​Decoration makes Yankeetown pottery some of the most distinctive ancient Native American pottery recovered from archaeological sites in the Ohio Valley. Typically, Yankeetown potters decorated their jars between the rim and shoulder. They​ incised thin, parallel lines in this area, creating narrow zones. They filled these zones with narrow incised lines oriented at right-angles or diagonally. Other kinds of decoration included complicated stamping, filigree (delicate patterns of lines of punctations, which are tiny circular depressions)​, nodes, rim folds, and lip notches.  

Decorated Yankeetown ceramics.

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