We found our first mystery artifact from the excavations. It’s a thick brick-like ceramic piece. It is flat on one side. On the other side it has an impressed design (possibly from a basket), evidence of burning, and a broken piece that extended out of the center. The sides, widthwise, are both flat and show no evidence of being broken, which would we expected if it were a fragment of a ceramic vessel. The sides lengthwise have both been broken, suggesting that the artifact was once longer. The piece comes from a suspected domestic context, but so far we haven’t been able to come up with a proposed use that we are happy with. Any ideas?

Mystery artifact recovered from IHAP 2014 excavations