Brenda and Agrippa arrive on site

Calum and Joe fight through the rain for day two:

Today our group was first up for learning the basics of photography in archaeology. We tried and tested a range of different angles and locations to try and get the perfect picture of the entire site as well as some individual features. In the end we discovered that elevation was key and ended up standing on top of the spoil heap to get a top-down view of the whole trench.


The digging took on a new shape today as the last of the plastic covering was taken up from the trench. This really made a difference to the way the site looks as it began to take the form of a real dig and not just a mound of soil and grass!

The next stage then began as we had to scrape off the clayey compacted layer of soil that covered the main layer that we are going to excavate. This was a good chance to utilise the new trowels that we had bought in preparation for the dig. Some of the trowels have even been given names, ranging from “Brenda” to “Agrippa”! Unfortunately this portion of the dig was cut short due to our first bout of heavy rain leading us to take cover in the mess hall and learn some more about context sheets.



William, Joe, Calum and Olly with Julie getting ready for levelling.