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Showing posts from May 21, 2017
We're back for our 12th season. Keep up to date with all the discoveries, brought to you by our daily bloggers.
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Some highlights from this year's finds...join us for our Open afternoon, Tuesday 30th May from 1.30pm to hear more... This carved stone, probably an architectural fragment of Norman date , has just started to be uncovered in our new trench where it has been re-used in a later feature...  A Jetton: a French late medieval counter A Jetton   A beer bottle with a witch logo A fragment of a beer bottle... A fragment of ‘ Facon de Venise’ wine glass, from the late C16th/early C17th Fancy decorated glass 
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Day 15 and 16 have been scorchers but we're still working hard…we host some visitors and the surface of the Roman road is reached... Emily… Today brought more sun and more finds, group E spent the morning doing our last finds session where we completed our interpretations of the contexts and bagged them up with small finds labels. We then began to select pieces to reference for our end of dig portfolio. After lunch we moved back to site to continue work on establishing the boundaries of the Roman road, where we found some more building material, pottery and animal bone. A 'small find', a piece of stamped clay pipe stem. Steph…  Day 16 of the dig was certainly the hottest so far! Steph and Victoria cleared back the sandstone covering more of the Roman road, with tough mattocking as the ground was baked hard. After some much needed ice lollies and shade more of the Roman road was revealed. Which consisted of sandstone rocks and pebbles. Finds from this
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Day 14 and things are hotting up on site… Jack… Today's main site lesson was the use of sun-cream! It was a very hot day on site making all the soil types incredibly dry and hard to excavate through. This didn’t stop our group though as we started to excavate down over the rest of the previously revealed Roman road so we could begin to see its full extent and hopefully find evidence of a road-side structure or building! Finds included numerous pieces of animal bone and pottery ranging from the medieval period and the Roman occupation as we got closer to the road’s surface. The standout find today from trench 7 was a possibly Viking or early medieval stone bead, which trench supervisor Dave was particularly fond of! All round a very warm day of excavation but looking forward to the rest of the final full week on site.   Max… Today we cleared some remaining rubble and fully exposed the linear brick feature in trench VIII. The team then drew corresponding site plans and
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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 s
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Day 12 Finds and features for a feel good Friday! Matt, Abbi and Amelia report… Matt... Friday morning saw Neil and I mattocking away at the densest part of the demolition layer in Trench VIII, with detectorist Colin nimbly avoiding the swinging blades to check newly exposed layers for metal finds. The quantities of roof slate, mortar and brick made for hard-going and comparatively few finds other than animal bone and the odd rusted nail. Even our ever-present friends the clay pipes seem to have deserted us; maybe an indication that we’re reaching 16th century layers that pre-date widespread tobacco smoking. One new find was the discovery of three striped escargot snail shells, close to a cluster of oyster shells. Classed as neither fish nor meat, snails made the ideal snack food for Lent, though they might be eaten year-round by the poorer members of society. Group B’s afternoon was spent classifying and marking the finds we’d previously cleaned. Splitting them first by mat
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Day 11 Rain's about? All-in-One’s out! Jess and Sophie tell us how archaeologist’s cope with the British weather… Jess… For today’s archaeologists, it was a typical British Summer’s day; we all rocked up to site keeping cool with sleeveless tops and cold coffees and by twelve o’clock the world decided to rain on our parade, literally. Team A kicked the day off by splitting into two smaller teams, and whilst Sophie and Amelia discovered the secrets that lay within a pit, the rest of us spent time plotting and planning the charcoal and sandstone deposits within the trench. Using specialised equipment such as a dumpy level, and measuring pole, the site’s height above sea level was recorded and added to the drawings in order to compile a fuller understanding of the site. It was during this that the rain poured on us and Steph finally got to try her all-in-one waterproof, much to the delight of the rest of us! The afternoon brightened up and we all complained, once again, a
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Day 10 Ben and Steph report on a damp but productive day… Ben… Wednesday was another damp day, but the weather didn't stop us unearthing some great finds! Matt and I found keys (still no locks though), but the star find of today has to be the four dice dug out of the building's hearth (evidently a poor roll). They were probably used for a game like Hazard, but I'm holding out for Dungeons and Dragons. Four bone dice A key! Steph… It was a chilly day on site for day 10 of the dig, with a bit of rain, but still plenty of work was going on. Team A spent the morning planning and drawing sections on site to record the Roman features we have discovered. In the afternoon we were finds processing, practicing marking finds with the site code and context number, ready for specialists to look at. The finds being washed and marked included clay pipe, pottery, roof and floor tile and building material. Other groups also planned parts of the site and continued to ex