All top soil is now removed from Trench 3, which leaves students to start troweling back. An unusual array of finds have been coming up, including working flint, pottery and modern wire. This shows just how much deep soil ploughing can affect the stratigraphy of features, making it hard to date them. It is still unclear exactly what is going on in this trench, but hopefully all will start to be revealed soon.

Excavations of small features within Trench 1 are also continuing. It is still undetermined exactly what they are, as a few of them look like postholes but the pattern of these isn’t clear. The remaining sections of the Mausoleum are also still being excavated, but there aren’t a lot of finds coming from them.

The deep pit from Trench 2 is now starting to reach an impressive depth. By the end of the day it was around 2m deep and it was almost to the point of having to use a ladder to get the students out. The ditch section that lies underneath the sunken feature is also almost fully excavated, with not a lot of soil left until the bottom was reached.

On site today we received a visit from the Marketing team at Bournemouth University, including Paul Fripp. They came to site in order to create a promotional video about the archaeology course at the University and about how the Durotriges Project is a very good experience. After interviewing several of the students and staff, they filmed people digging as well as doing various other activities on site, such as finds washing. After having a large group photo in one of the trenches, we were able to resume our activities as normal.