Tuesday 21st May

For Marc, Tuesday brings bones, bones and more bones…

Weather forecasters eh!.....today’s forecast, warm and hazy sun, the reality, cold drizzle ALL day! Never mind, it didn’t stop me and my little team of Chris and Lauren making impressive headway with our digging. 3 foot down and the outlined features of what could be a culvert running to a pit are beginning to show through nicely. Our trowelling also brought up another lot of goodies, well, mostly animal bone, with a little Cistercian ware thrown in, but mainly bone. Hmmm....bones. If there’s one thing the last few days of digging have revealed in plenty its these, so much so that we are all getting a little sick of the sight of them.  Good job we haven’t got a lecture this afternoon on them........

The afternoon sees us out of the rain and our damp hole and into Albion Street for a lecture on............bones!!!!

A visiting lecturer from Liverpool John Moores University imparts his considerable expertise on the many facets of bioturbation and soil sampling and also identifies many of our own bone finds for us, which, all sarcasm aside, was actually very helpful. After this session of enlightenment we head back to our trench for the last hour and more digging.  I definitely think we are going to need the stepladders soon.......

Marc, Lauren and Chris making good progress with their section across what appears to be a very large pit!

Michael makes his mark!

Today me and the rest of my group spent the morning washing more finds from the different contexts throughout the site, and marked the clean pieces with pen and ink in order for other people to recognise where the artefacts originated. I found the marking very enjoyable because it was different to the things I have done so far on the dig.

In the afternoon, all of us had a lecture on environmental archaeology in which we learned about different bone types and the location of bones in the environment. Overall, today has been a break from simply excavating the site and a welcome one since the weather today was pretty poor. I am looking forward to getting back to the excavation side of the work-based learning.

A long but enjoyable day for Liz:

Today started off with handing in the public archaeology essay which was good as it means there is only one more assignment to go till we finish! And Amy had brought us pastries! We got to site and continued with the previous work we had been doing. There were a fair few people off doing other activities so the site was quite quiet for once! The misty rain made the morning quite dull and didn’t make the people who were feeling ill much better. In the afternoon we received a lecture on environmental archaeology which was interesting because we learnt all about sampling and how to recognise different animals just by looking at the bone. By the end of the day I think we were all quite glad to get home and go to sleep!

 One of the many animal bones recovered from the site - so who can tell us what it is?