Day 14 and things are hotting up on site…

Jack…

Today's main site lesson was the use of sun-cream! It was a very hot day on site making all the soil types incredibly dry and hard to excavate through. This didn’t stop our group though as we started to excavate down over the rest of the previously revealed Roman road so we could begin to see its full extent and hopefully find evidence of a road-side structure or building! Finds included numerous pieces of animal bone and pottery ranging from the medieval period and the Roman occupation as we got closer to the road’s surface. The standout find today from trench 7 was a possibly Viking or early medieval stone bead, which trench supervisor Dave was particularly fond of!

All round a very warm day of excavation but looking forward to the rest of the final full week on site. 

Max…

Today we cleared some remaining rubble and fully exposed the linear brick feature in trench VIII. The team then drew corresponding site plans and documented the finds. Some of our more interesting finds consisted of pig mandibles and large assemblages of other bones including an animal humerus. The excavation team continues to rack up more metal finds such as nails and many different pottery sherds, as well as various ceramic building material. A majority of the team were able to identify the finds acquired over the last few weeks and sort each type of find ready for further analysis. For now we move on to the next area of the trench with mattock in hand to search for more corresponding features of trench VIII.

 

One end of the mysterious brick feature...a drain or not?!

Pauline...

The mysterious brick feature is still causing intrigue. We've cleaned and photographed it but still no idea what it is. It has yielded lots of pig and boar jaw bones and tusks. Dan the dig director fancied it as a gun emplacement but it might just be a plain old drain. So his enthusiasm for uncovering more has dampened and it will be left to next year’s students to discover what it really is. Time Team was never like this!  Amy brought cakes again - thank you Amy, we need the sugar rush now!  Just five more days, including our public day (Tues 30th!) when we are hoping for lots of visitors. 

Jaw bone.