Friday 27th June 2014
Today was due to be another day filled with rain, however it remained relatively dry compared to yesterday.
In Trench 1 the large stone (nicknamed ‘Pebble’) was finally lifted from its pit. The purpose of putting the stone there remains unclear, however the stone did lie directly on top of a context filled with charcoal. It seems to have been placed there intentionally, but we don’t know the reason behind this. The plan drawing to map out the whole mausoleum started today, and this plan can help us to work out the relationship of the mausoleum with other features. The skeletal remains from Trench 1 were organised and taken to the labs at Bournemouth University for post-excavation analysis. This will be able to tell us if the skeletons had some kind of disease, as well as each person’s overall health. It can also be possible to determine via isotope analysis which region the people grew up in, which will be interesting of we find that they were born and grew up in a separate location to where the villa is.
Large amounts of pottery were being found in the gulley feature within Trench 2. These include some higher status pieces of pottery, as well as a huge amount of hobnails. This gulley is the same feature where the large piece of antler found found, although it was in a different section. It is still unclear what this gulley is and what it was used for. The rest of the sheep remains were found in one of the ditches in Trench 2. The baulk in between two sections had to be removed because the sheep’s skeleton continued into the baulk, plus the site directors hoped that the rest of the Bronze Age skeleton would be in the baulk. The sunken feature in the trench is also still being excavated. The concave pit being dug by Virginia Barnard-Brown and Joshua Bruce is still revealing a large amount of charcoal, ash and burnt flint. This suggests that there used to be some kind of industrial action taking place on this site. It may be metal-working because of the large amounts of slag being found, but it is not certain yet.