David Amor and Zoe Edwards cleaning pottery
The weather conditions have not improved so there is no excavation on site today for first year students. The second and third years as well as some volunteers have therefore spent the day in a laboratory on the university campus cleaning and processing finds. There were so many finds from last year’s excavation that not all of them have been processed yet. These need to be cleaned and fully recorded before this year’s finds are looked at. The finds are cleaned simply by brushing them gently with a toothbrush over a bowl full of water; obviously care needs to be taken as some finds are more delicate than others.
Carolina Sanchez-Ignacio and Jane Matthews completing the finds register
Once cleaned, the finds are placed into a finds tray to dry and are then catalogued into the finds register. The finds register has been completed today by second year students Carolina Sanchez-Ignacio, studying BSc Archaeological, Anthropological and Forensic Sciences, and Jane Matthews, studying BSc Archaeology. These find details are then entered into a computer database so that people can search for a particular find in the future, for example Samian Ware pottery, and they can then get a corresponding box number which includes that particular find. Cleaning of finds is needed to aid further analysis of artefacts. Many pots from last year have been reconstructed and can inform us about past material culture. The people that were buried with these pots would have been alive during the transition between the Iron Age and Roman periods and would have experienced the change between pre-history and history. Not much detail is known about this period of time which is why this site is particularly exciting.
Gethyn Phillips holding a Kimmeridge shale tile
Other artefacts that have been cleaned today include a large piece of shale which was used as a table top during the early Roman period. Shale artefacts were cleaned by third year student Gethyn Phillips who has just completed his BA Roman Archaeology degree course. If the shale is allowed to dry it will crack so it has to be sealed in water so that the relative humidity and temperature are kept constant in order to stop it deteriorating.