The Cache Pit and Village Subsistence

The Cache Pit and Village Subsistence. Huff Indian Village State Historic Site. You are standing above one of a estimated 1,700 storage, or cache, pits in the village. A cache pit was a bell-shaped, underground chamber used primarily to store garden produce such as dried corn, beans, and squash. Farming produced a large surplus of food stored for use and trade to nomadic, non-farming groups. Horticulture combined with bison hunting resulted in a diversified and flexible economy. Over time, a cache pit would become moldy or rodent-infested. It would then be abandoned and filled with trash. Village trash excavation revealed large amounts of discarded animal bones and many stone and bone tools. , The drawing to the left shows a cross section through the pit beneath the ground at this location, This pit was typical in size and capable of holding 34 bushels. The estimated 1,700 storage pits in Huff Village reflect a combined storage capacity of 56,000 bushels - used over the life of the village. The pit cross section records the history of this feature. When originally excavated, soil was thrown from the pit onto the surrounding ground surface. Sometime during use, one edge of the pit caved in. Later, this pit was filled with loads of ash from hearths inside nearby houses and refuse from inside and outside nearby dwellings. , Two cache pits were partially excavated in 1999. Archaeologists used fine-screening (see photo at right) to recover a sample of village subsistence remains (mostly animal bones and charred botanical remains). This work was successful yielding many hundreds of identified bones, as well as charred corn suitable for radiocarbon dating. The fine-screen recovery revealed a broad-based use of wild fruit and seed-producing plants. More than 120 pounds of animal bones were found in the trash.