Wednesday 2nd July 2014
Further work is still being done in Trench 3 today. Due to the topsoil not being removed beforehand, the students digging it have to remove it all by hand in order to be able to determine the features that lie under the top soil. The crossover of two ditches may be visible in Trench 3, and it will be good to see how the ditches correlate.
The terminal ditch section in Trench 2 has surprised everyone by revealing a purposefully cut area used for flint knapping. This area lay directly underneath the scatter of knapped flint found a few days prior. However the flint being knapped isn’t of high quality, which is curious because the whole area is rich in good quality flint. It was suggested that this flint working area was used by those that wanted to practice their skills, rather than being used by already skilled flint-knappers. Harry Manley sat inside the working hollow and demonstrated what it would’ve looked like with someone in there knapping flint. Damian Evans brought over a few examples of worked lint that had been found, one of which that had distinct ripples from the bulb of percussion. In the section of another ditch Miles Russell was let loose with a mattock and was able to find the edges of the ditch which had previously not been found. Tilly continued the plan drawing plotting every feature onto the site map with help from Rob Hellawell and Io Gray- Davies.
Trench 1 remained surprisingly empty of students today. The search for post-holes within the Bronze Age enclosure continued, and a few sections of the square enclosure ditch were also still being dug. However today we had a visit from the group of 30 teenagers from the Summer School at Bournemouth University. This was to introduce the students to archaeology. They were assigned to trowel back the inside of the Bronze Age enclosure in Trench 1 in order to expose any potential features. However they all left site at 1pm, and so only a small section of the trench was troweled back.