Tuesday 1st July 2014
Excavations in Trench 3 continued today. Because the students are having to remove the top soil by hand it is taking a while to get don yo the chalk in order to identify any features within the trench. It is hoped that Trench 3 will reveal the turning point for two separate ditches, and we can use them to determine if they are contemporary with each other.
The planning of the graves is still continuing in Trench 1. It is being completed by using tape measures and plumbobs to record the features onto a large site map. Alice Galligar and Libby Johnson are troweling back the northern part of the trench in hopes that some postholes and new features will be revealed. Some fairly promising features are already showing up, so excavating them will be the next part of the plan.
Dawn Robinson and Tristan Murray were having a lot of fun today washing ‘Pebble’, the large stone found in a pit in Trench 1. The rock is being cleaned so that it can be examined to see if it is special in any way. This is because it is rather unusual to place such a large rock in a pit without it having some kind of purpose or meaning.
Over in Trench 2 the final quadrant of the Roman housing platform is being excavated, and it is on the half of the platform that overlies the Iron Age ditch. By taking out the final quadrant we should be able to get a good idea of the stratigraphy. The flint scatter from the end ditch section is being removed by Georgina Byrne and Katherine Hebbard, and they are making sure to keep every piece of worked flint in order to record them properly. A pit inside Trench 2 this is producing a huge amount of fire-cracked flint and charcoal is still producing the same things. The charcoal layer in the pit is around 1ft deep so far.