Day 5: The end of the first week of digging

Pottery, bones, and more bones!

After a hard week of digging back fill in the hot sun, we were rewarded with finds.

An eventful day on the site started off with team D scraping back loose soil from the remains of the Roman road and wishing Kate a happy 20^th birthday!

After hours of what seemed like endless scraping of rocks, bricks, and clay soil we finally made progress in revealing the materials this ancient road was made from. While scraping, we also noticed a large chunk of a Roman pottery (Samian ware), protruding from out of the Roman drainage gully! While we weren’t allowed to move it yet, it was deemed by the group worthy of a photo.

Later on in the day, team D went on to mattock a large open space near the end of the Roman road. While the section of earth looked plain and boring to begin with, a medieval pottery handle was found in great condition. This one large chunk of a pot can only mean more medieval domestic finds to come!

Later still, team A’s Cameron and Ross unearthed a large medieval, possibly horse or cattle bone. After a well-placed boning joke, Cameron lifted the large, what appeared to be femur, from the site to show us all. 

But the bone finds didn’t stop there, and there were only more bone jokes to come. Later on Team A discovered another huge medieval animal bone find. A cattle horn, unearthed in the same place as the large possible femur. 

But Team A weren’t the only ones to finds bones today. Team D and Team B found an abundance of small animal bones, with team B discovering unidentified teeth still attached to a jaw bone, and Team D discovering large quantities of cattle teeth.

Now after a long week of work in the sun and mud, it’s time for steak and a pint. 

Harry