Today has proved difficult in the fact that the rain has made the site extremely muddy. In conditions like this, too many archaeologists really can ‘spoil the broth’ and the site can easily become very crowded, dirty and mucky again, something we ideally would like to avoid especially after spending a few days cleaning it. Most of the first year students therefore stayed at the University campus in order to clean and process finds whilst the second year and a few first year students went along to the site to try and uncover more of the Roman buildings in Area G. Although the weather can make the site very dirty very quickly, it was however extremely useful for being able to excavate around the flint walls of the Roman buildings. The soil around these types of features can get very hard and compact when dry which can result in some of the stone being pulled away if too much force is applied. In moist conditions, the soil around the walls comes away rather easily which is why we tried to optimise our time at the site whilst the rain continued to threaten it.
Perinatal inhumation burial
Not all features are easy to excavate in these conditions however, which is why the remains of a perinatal burial were left today after being discovered in Area H yesterday. ‘Perinatal’ is a term used to describe the period of time, usually a number of days or weeks, immediately before or after birth, thus the bones that are present are therefore extremely small and when the mud is so thick, like it was today, almost impossible to identify being such small finds. Therefore this particular burial remained protected and covered over, and will continue to do so until the weather conditions improve. Despite the near continuous rain, some earth resistivity geophysical survey was successfully undertaken. Hopefully weather condition will improve tomorrow so that excavation work can resume.