CAER: Chester Amphitheatre Environs Research Project

Updates from Team A and B… Jake… On a wet first day back excavating after a long weekend, Team B returned to trowelling back the far corner of trench 8 where we left off on Friday. Due to the wet weather it was easier to see the difference in colour of the contexts and we were able to find an orange/red clay that we were looking for on the Friday. After completing that we were tasked with removing a previously recorded feature at the end of the trench. After lunch Team B had a finds session in the pavilion where we looked at separating finds and also looked at how the finds might be interpreted. Team B ended the day cleaning some finds from the excavation. David… Today  marks beginning of the end for the excavation [ noooo! ] but the A team continued on with the trench. The tasks that we accomplished today were based on cleaning up the trench and creating a section drawing of the new archaeological features. It seems the A team were not affected by the weather, consi...

For Marc, Tuesday brings bones, bones and more bones… Weather forecasters eh!.....today’s forecast, warm and hazy sun, the reality, cold drizzle ALL day! Never mind, it didn’t stop me and my little team of Chris and Lauren making impressive headway with our digging. 3 foot down and the outlined features of what could be a culvert running to a pit are beginning to show through nicely. Our trowelling also brought up another lot of goodies, well, mostly animal bone, with a little Cistercian ware thrown in, but mainly bone. Hmmm....bones. If there’s one thing the last few days of digging have revealed in plenty its these, so much so that we are all getting a little sick of the sight of them.  Good job we haven’t got a lecture this afternoon on them........ The afternoon sees us out of the rain and our damp hole and into Albion Street for a lecture on............bones!!!! A visiting lecturer from Liverpool John Moores University imparts his considerable expertise on t...

Jasmine gives us the news for today: It's the third week of the dig and we have had a second day of gorgeous sunshine. That's right you heard it here -  gorgeous sunshine in England! I would also like to mention that everyday I've written the blog, we've had sun... Today we were given a talk on environmental samples and why it is important to take these on site. I usually try to sift through most of the soil when I am putting it into the buckets; however, I didn't realize how much can be missed. Some of the bones we were shown were minuscule. This talk only took place over the morning and the rest of the afternoon was spent back in the trench. Clearly the work we do is fascinating to all as we had an invader on site in the form of a very confused mallard; this is not the first time this has happened as it was a squirrel yesterday! I think probably the best find of the day was a medieval key found by Will (not dice man Jonathan as you would expect!). Sorry Jon...