CAER: Chester Amphitheatre Environs Research Project

Thursdays are always the hardest, the day before the last day before the weekend. You want rest, but you can’t rest, not yet. The dig has slowed down a bit since last week, we’re doing a lot less heavy lifting and a lot more trowelling – at least we look like real archaeologists now  (but we  gotta  cut down on the burgers, sadly). Today Simon had us move around the trench, digging different places to get a feel for the site.  Group C got split, so Nick and I worked on the assumed  fill  of the wall to the chapel.  It was really rocky and full of rubble, the aim was to get it all out (it took longer than we expected it to). But Nick likes to be a macho man and took over the mattock straight away and began attacking the ground. Fun to watch, but there was a lot of rock hard, baked  soil just being thrown into anyone’s face if they got closer than 2 metres.  A lot of bone appeared around the ditches  from the Johnathon and  Yash ...

  The day began with the mighty team E being allocated finds duty, washing identifying and recording finds from various contexts across the  site including items such as bone, pottery and glass.   This led to many amazing revelations including our very own  Ca llum’s discovery of the fact that hot water is indeed hot.  During first break we ventured to the site see what the other trowel monkeys had been up to, mainly carrying on the valiant fight against sun hardened clay or in the case of team  A  recording their finely trowelled features.  After another stint at the finds washing HQ we returned to site where we disc overed that team  C had commandeered our allocated trench space and continued our glorious work of  trowling  to find the uniform c harcoal layer that appeared across it.    Team D continued work on excavating a cross section of a pit as well as defining the edge of one of the ditches and Matt doing his fines...

Today was  pretty much a continuation from yesterday with team B (the best team) working on the roman road and the roadside ditches with everybody working on their own areas in the  trench.   Rachel and I were hunting for stones the whole day (with only a small amount of success and multiple shouts of “Stones” being shouted across the site) and Bethany and Bryony were excavating part of the roman road with a pretty awesome find of two connected vertebrae bones! Some really cool things are starting  to appear now with  the hearth coming out at the far  end of the site and next to the hearth the end of the medieval building is starting to appear!  There have been some interesting finds  such as teeth, pottery and lots and lots of bone! We spent the day laughing a joking and some of us sat in wheelbarrows in the breaks! This dig is starting to shape up to be an amazing  experience with some amazing people and I’m looking forward to spending the ...

The realisation that archaeologists are fuelled entirely by biscuits and doughnuts has come as so mething of a revelation.  You may not realise, but were it not for  the humble  peak  frean  assortment, little  excavation  work would  ever  take place.   So it’s thanks to Caroline and Meggen  and their regular biscuit deliveries  that we’ve progressed as far as we have. To the excavation   which ,  despite the risk of type 2 diabetes , enthusiastically continues. T he finds are coming thick a nd fast , p redominantly animal bone with a fair representation of Roman, medieval and post medieval potsherds  all within similar contexts. This latter point is absolutely in keeping with the nature of the site which has been subject to  periods of intense activity over  course of almost 2000 y ears, with objects being churned around within the soil as building works displace d  them from their original resti...

After an extremely lazy weekend of takeaways and relaxing, we're starting week 2 slightly refreshed and less painfully sun burnt. Despite those early morning Monday blues, this week has marked the beginning of cleaning the finds, as we ditched our t r owels for toothbrushes. The meticulous process of cleaning has allowed us to see the colourful pottery, glass, tobacco pipes a lot clearer, as they also appear to be the most prominent finds on site including animal bone fragments, so far!  As we have only just begun to touch new archaeology so there'll be loads more to cle an and discover! Meanwhile the majority of our concerns feature; which fast food chain we're going to consume for lunch today before we return back to the site to continue to unearth new archaeology! - Bettie!   So week 2 started pretty nicely! After a therapeutic morning cleaning finds, we scrapped our cleaning equipment for our trusty trowels! - time for some more digging of course.  Which luckily, turn...