Close up of a partially excavated cooking pit (Feature 49) found beneath Feature 37 within the swale (old filled-in river channel). The pit fill has been partially removed to show the pit’s original shape. This pit was part of an earth oven—layered cooking arrangements of hot rocks insulated by an outer layer of earth. The oven had probably been cleaned out and rebuilt many times, each time adding more spent cooking rocks to the scattered donut-shaped layer that archeologist call a “sheet midden” (Feature 37). Charcoal from the fill of the pit was radiocarbon dated to about 3500 B.C. (4670 +/- 60 B.P. in radiocarbon years). TARL archives.