It's about the principles of archeology in general: If you find one, how common was it, where did the idea to do it come from, who was the constructor, where did the material come from, etc...? 

Marcel,

While it turned out not to be a cobbed floor, the question still has relevance. I know that settlers immigrating from Ireland, Britain, and Europe brought building traditions with them. Prime example is the French post-in-ground construction using bousillage. The English settlers in Maryland often used heavy timber framing and packed mud in the Tudor style of construction. However, in the case of cobbed floors, I have not been able to find any information on how common they are in pre-1900 construction in the U.S. Curious that no one has any input.

actually James, it is not so strange that no one has any input since floors are the most overlooked aspect of buildings among archaeologists, why I don't know but unless they are as substantial as Roman floors the only people who seem interested are specialists in Meso and early Neo lithic periods.  I don't know what it is like in America but here in UK this frequently reaches ridiculous levels when a reconstruction is built of a sophisticated structure with a floor that you need rubber boots to walk on if it rains.

Maybe it's a result of the wall chasing method of excavation that too many excavators still adopt.  The only exception that springs to mind is the recent use of floors to demonstrate occupation in the Stone Henge environs, a project lead by Mike Parker Pearson, maybe he has some wider ethnographic parallels since he certainly uses such to model Meso/Neolithic society.

Timothy,

Re. with a floor that you need rubber boots to walk on. Not sure I understand this statement, since from everything I have read about the British and European cobbed floors is that they are as durable as concrete and approx. 7-12 cm thick. People I've talked to think that cobbed floors and dirt floors are synonymous, when they are not.

Still, the disregard of archaeologists over there for cobbed floors is interesting, especially since cobbed floors were so popular and an integral part of the structure. I mean, if we find an intact or nearly intact brick floor over here we get excited.

the statement was meant to highlight the lack of attention given to floors, a building is built in reconstruction on a  heritage site and instead of giving it a proper floor as per the original, the builders, following the specs they have been given, leave it with a simple mud floor that is totally inadequate when it rains.  It may be because the floors have been lost to erosion and are therefore ignored in the reconstructions, this seems likely given that the wall trenches, foundations or postholes are themselves often truncated by erosion, or as I said previously perhaps all the attention given to walls in excavations means that the evidence is simply not making it into site reports.  I have certainly worked on sites where a floor was cleaned until the wall was discovered and then, unless an earlier phase was suspected, ignored in order to concentrate on the walls.  Indeed it used to be a joke among British archaeologists, 1 stone is a stone, 2 is a feature, 3 is a wall, 4 a corner and therefore a building.  Do you see any reference to floors here?

True. The few old British reports I have seen talk about the resiliency of cobbed floors, often present 500 years after the destruction of the structure, if I remember correctly. The clay, ash, straw, and often lime packed properly create a simple but highly effective pseudo-concrete.

What is interesting is a story I tell about a classically-trained archaeologist (Roman archaeology) who was helping to excavate a Contact/Colonial period Native American site at the foot of a ridge that had a colonial Spanish mission on its crest. The PhD. archaeologist kept cursing about damned rocks in his 1x2. We finally went to see what all of the fuss was about, only to discover that he had excavated through the stone floor of a Spanish corn crib, complete with early small maize cobs. Apparently his classical training had kicked in!

I hope you took the opportunity to explore the section that he had inadvertently created, I must admit that here in UK I might be inclined to dig through such a floor in order to provide just such a section, but I understand in the USA you are a little more cautious on such matters

Well, the point being that he didn't even stop the level/strata at the "rocks". So, we don't know what artifacts were sitting on the floor, what artifacts were in the cracks of the stone floor, or what artifacts were below the stone floor. Completely screwed up any data analysis above, at, or below the floor. We had to open a side unit in order to get adequate data and samples for C14.

that bad, that is not classical archaeology training that is bad training, all artefacts should have been recorded even in the classical archaeology programmes, admittedly sometimes on very artefact rich sites in a rescue dig we might not be quite so fastidious but not in a poorer site