Day Sixteen: surfaces everywhere

With the hard slog of the day before (largely) over, all were rewarded by the appearance of 'surfaces' across the the trench. This is a term used by archaeologists to describe features such as floors or occupation layers, as opposed to the large dumps of demolition or collaspe material we've largely been removing to date. In layman's terms this is the fun stuff! In the centre of the trench further flat flag stones started to appear and these seem to be related to the fireplace structure we've all be admiring for ages.

The site looking largely rubble free! Spot the possible floor flags.

To the west of the fireplace removal of a demolition layer that contained lots of burnt material revealed a hard packed surface. Although this doesn't appear to have a flagged floor, we did get a glimpse of what might be an early phase of occupation, as there is another wall running at an odd angle to all the others underneath.

An earlier phase wall emerging?

Everyone seemed to really enjoy the new developments taking place in Trench One, or perhaps it was just Beryl's home cooked bacon sarnies that raised morale. Whatever it was, all were relived that the somewhat apocalyptic weather warnings that had been issued through out the day proved unfounded and we hardly experienced a drop of rain.

Phoebe is overjoyed at having travelled all the way from New Zealand just for this!

Millie just loves cleaning up that floor

All the finds we're getting now are now much more significant, as they relate directly to the occupation and use of the buildings, rather than having been dumped after the structures were abandoned. We've been finding lots more pottery and some interesting 'small finds', which are artefacts that we record the exact three dimensional location of using the total station. These include another nice copper pin, which mysteriously came two pins once it passed through Pete's hands and a very small piece of glass found by Ian. This got Hugh rather excited, who announced it was part of a portion of decorated Venetian drinking glass, despite the fact it looked distinctly 1970s in date to everyone else.

A tiny piece of rather groovy Venetian glass

Back in Trench 2 things were also hotting up. With the removal of a spread of stones a new feature crossing the trench was seen. This was running at a different angle to the large wall, and appears to be a narrow cut filled by large stones set on their edge. No one would really tell what this was, but once this is cleaned up it can be excavated properly.

Emma and Dane cleaning up the new linear feature

So all in all another successful day!