Grace Rajnovich's (1983) thesis describes excavation of two Selkirk (Late Woodland) habitation structures at the Spruce Point site (DjKq-1) in the Kenora District of western Ontario.  The structures were defined by a color and texture contrast between the interior and exterior sediments.  Both had interior features.  Neither structure was completely exposed.  Rajnovich provided inferred outlines of the structures.  She estimated their dimensions to have been about 4m in width x 6 or 7m in length.  The plan view of Structure A is shown to the right.  The plan view of Structure B is here.

Above: Structure A (from Figure 8 of Rajnovich 1983:98).  This will be Structure 2235 in the database.

I stumbled upon a paper by Reid and Rajnovich (1991) that describes three Woodland structures from the Ballynacree site in the Kenora District of western Ontario.  The structures are about 8m x 4m, defined by both postmolds and contrasts between interior and exterior sediments.  At the time the paper was written, the three structures from the site constituted the majority of known, excavated Laurel houses.  I do not know if that is still the case.

Three radiocarbon determinations suggest that House 1 dates to about AD 1250. This is, of course, a relatively late age for something that is called "Middle Woodland."  These houses, like others that strain the Midwest/Southeast-centered cultural-historical framework that I'm currently using, are encouraging me to rethink the organization of the database.  Since the relationships between our temporal and cultural chronologies are not consistent across the eastern woodlands, it may be a good move to separate them in the organization of the database. I'm considering simply dividing "time" into discrete blocks (say 200, 500, or 1000 years in duration) and then several columns to categorize the cultural-historical placement of the site (e.g., Archaic - Late Archaic - Brewerton).  This would allow one to plot groups of contemporaneous structures within thicker or thinner slices of time.  Something to think about.

Above:  Figure 3 from Reid and Rajnovich 1991:196.  The caption is "The Ballynacree site excavations revealed three houses with their associated features--a complete Laurel village.

Daniel Zulandt's M.A. thesis (Zulandt 2010 - available online here) contains plan maps of the 1957 and 1958 excavations at the Zencor Village site (33-Fr-8) in Franklin County, Ohio.  Those excavations exposed the remains of at least three post structures dating to somewhere in the period A.D. 500-1000.  Raymond Baby and colleagues mentioned the existence of these structures in several short papers (e.g., Baby 1971; Baby and Shaffer 1957; Mays and Baby 1958), but with scant details:

"The remains of at least three houses . . . The structures represented by the postmolds were 25 to 36 feet in diameter, with an overlapping wall serving as an entrance.  The postmolds averaged 0.6 feet in diameter and were set in the ground 1.5 feet deep and 2.5 feet apart" (Baby 1971:196).

The plan maps reproduced by Zulandt (2010:Figures 5, 6, and 7) show the post structures and their relationships to features at the site.  I don't know that these maps were not available elsewhere prior to Zulandt's thesis, but this is the first place I have seen them and I think it is useful to point out their existence. 

I already had an entry for the Zencor Village site in the database.  In the next issues of the database, however, there will be one entry for each structure.  The dimensions of each structure will be estimated from these drawings.

Figure 7 from Daniel Zulandt's thesis (Zulandt 2010:25), showing remains of structure in Area A' (this will be Structure 2227 in the database).

Figure 6 from Daniel Zulandt's thesis (Zulandt 2010:24) showing remains of structures in Area B (Structure 670 in the database) and Trench 1 (Structure 2212 in the database).

Jarrod Burks' dissertation, entitled Identifying Household Cluster and Refuse Disposal Patterns at the Strait Site: A Third Century A.D. Nucleated Settlement in the Middle Ohio River Valley (Burks 2004), considers how patterns of trash disposal can be used to assess the contemporaneity of residential structures.  Jarrod examines artifact density data from shovel probes in  light of a model of household-level trash disposal developed from ethnoarchaeological data, then compares the results to geophysical and excavation results.  Portions of two structures were exposed.  I have added a listing for the Strait site to the inventory for Ohio, and will include the site in the next version of the Database. 

The Strait site (33-Fa-156-158) is one of only a handful of "Middle Woodland - Late Woodland Transitional" sites in the Database.  Sites of this age (i.e., arguably post-Hopewell, generally associated with projectile points belonging to the Lowe Cluster) are sometimes referred to in the literature as "late Middle Woodland" and other times as "early Late Woodland."  Hence my decision to give them their own category.  These sites represent a time of important change in the organizational structure of settlement during the Woodland period in the Ohio Valley.  Read Jarrod's dissertation to find out more.

Above:  Artifact cluster interpretations and proposed household clusters at the Strait site (Burks 2004: Figure B.64).