Tuesday 22 July 2014

Week 4

Sorry all for the radio silence - we've just been too busy digging!

Week 4 has got underway with some very warm, and very humid weather. Today we may have been melting a little... But soil continues to be moved at a good pace, as we take the layers of the site down.

Highlights of the first half of this week include the digging of a slot across the edge of the top surface of the Roman road, finding a series of second century jars and  beakers in the well, and some bronze coins in the late Roman ditches that line the north edge of the site.

A post medieval intervention truncating these ditches has produced a lot of material, including a Stuart coin and fragments of bellarmine jug; these are a sharp contrast to our Roman assemblages which for the rest of the site artefacts. We hope to have cleared these post-med deposits very soon and then begin to understand the relationship of these ditches to the road surface.

This week's students are enjoying (we hope) the sunny skies and the generous Roman layers - these soils offer our participants a lit of opportunity to get to know pottery and animal bones. We have had a couple of good lectures this week so far with Dr Cliff Sofield briefing the teams on the Anglo-Saxon Wessex and Priscilla Lange giving training on animal bone identification. Tomorrow Ian Cartwright will give a lecture on archaeological photography.

We will keep you posted daily now on the final countdown to the end of the 2014 season!

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