Day 13 brings animal magic and marks the start of our last full week of digging…

Sarah...

The last week begins! A morning clearing up the newly exposed brick feature in trench 8 with large numbers of animal bones being recovered and saved from the mattock blade. Quite the coincidence as group D spent the afternoon exploring the complexities of animal bone identification.

Learning to identify animal bones

Tricky but intriguing work, followed by some photographic recording of both the brick and sandstone features appearing in the east end of the trench. The mysterious brick feature will hopefully reveal its purpose as the week goes on...




The cleaned up brick-feature ready for photographing and planning...hopefully excavation will reveal more about its function (Where's the scale though guys? (Ed.))
 

Hard at work removing the deposits...



A copper alloy token.

 

Victoria B…

The start of the final full week brought the promise of sun. Team A started the day off by cleaning up a section ready for recording. After morning tea break, several groups went to the pavilion to learn about animal bone and how to identify the major bones within a mammal and some differences between species.

In the afternoon, recording of the newly exposed contexts began in trench IV. This involved setting up a horizontal string line to measure down from, in order to accurately record the deposits visible in section.

Setting up ready to record the section through the deposits.

Rhys...

The beginning of our last full week turned out to be a very full and interesting day, as my group started the day we began by sorting out the archaeological finds that we have each personally cleaned, labelled and marked to then be further recorded. In the afternoon we then had a zooarchaeology session which was very interesting and personally the highlight of my day. During the session we were taught how to identify pieces of bone that we had excavated and record, and the basic bone structure of animals which I found really interesting and how to identify the bones. Then the rest of the day was spent cleaning an area to reveal more of the roman road which was discovered the previous week. Overall the day was interesting and fun and I hope this is a continuing theme through out the week which I have a feeling it will be.