Day 10: the halfway point and the rest is looking bright

The second week is over and we are finally free of the backfill. 

Today, me and Ellen finished the drawing of the clay deposit, that can be seen to the west of the site, adding the rocks and the hachures to indicate slopes and dips in the clay. To make this drawing accurate a metre grid had to be placed onto the earth with all of the 4 sides being level. This does not sound like a hard task, but we have concluded that this is extremely difficult especially as once it becomes perfect it can be easily knocked. This is mainly due to the fact that each of the corners are held up by a series of rocks balanced precariously under or on top of the grid itself, resulting in a test of whether or not the rock or brick we are holding is going to cause the bubble to reach the middle of the spirit level or whether it will throw the whole thing off balance.

We also attempted to take levels using a dumpy level this morning however, this needs the use of mathematics and my early morning brain got very confused with the decimal places. Although, I did manage to understand eventually and we did get some records of the dips and rises of the deposit.

This afternoon we were marking the finds with the context number to avoid any losses. This was a very tedious task as many of the finds were small and the ink kept turning into blobs, therefore making some marks only just legible. After this we were washing are second lot of finds. Between us we have washed, what is thought to be, pig’s teeth, clay pipes, bone and numerous fragments of pottery.

To finish the week off we were given a tour of the site in order to understand where we have got to in these last two weeks.

We are now halfway through our dig and the finds we are getting back from excavation are making the site look very promising for the next half of our dig.

Meg