Well it’s the National Archaeology Days this Saturday and Sunday, and Friday there are some VIPs and massed ranks of the press (so that’ll be the Swindon Evening Advertiser and the free paper, that comes through the door with all those glossy pizza, burger, kebab, double glazing, hairdressing and nail bar, lose weight, golf sale, pine warehouse leaflets, then) and we are cleaning up the site – not that it needs it. Pete has even borrowed my strimmer and got poor old Geoff (site management) , cutting back all that nasty grass

I couldn’t believe the tool store when I saw it at lunchtime :eek , it was sparkling, Liz, one of the archaeologists, had performed a miracle and tidied it – with little labels telling you where to line up the mattocks, shovels, spades, buckets etc., in fact it was so different that I spent 10 minutes looking around for the old tool store. Well done Liz

So in “deep room” we are still peeling back the soil to expose our two or three layers of plaster for the big wigs to admire. I can only keep my fingers crossed that we impress so much that next year funding is available to open up the site again.

West wall of “Deep Room”
showing 2 layers of plaster and plastered chamfered edge of door or niche with infill

Pilae and masonry
floor supports (the pilae have a tegula for a base!!)

Same
Hot air channel is visable behind stacks, to the left.

Another room
being cleaned

Post hole
and post pad and flue and everything!!!

So on the off chance of someone high up in English Heritage is reading this, here is an example of some letters that some 9 year old school children sent me about their “Archaeologist for a Day” experience last week.

Spelling mistakes theirs, explanatory parentheses mine.

Dear Chris (that’s me), Thankyou for teaching us to do the uppy downy game (earthwork surveying) that was one of my favourite things. I am going to ask my mum If we can go

there agian.

P.S. Laura Bullivant, the EH Community Education and Outreach Officer for Groundwell, asked me to show a group of 14-16 year olds around the site, I decided not to show them the uppy-downy game

From the EH website…Week 6 Day 1

We have removed most of the capping stones from our early drain and it is clear that it is stone-lined, very narrow and fully silted-up.
In Room 1 we are removing the soil that we left against the walls to protect the plaster that we know to survive on walls of the cellar. Whilst doing this we received not one, but two surprises. There are two layers of plaster on the west wall and there is an infilled opening in the western wall and possibly one in the south wall –are they doors, windows or niches? – given that we have only four days digging left we may well not find out. However as with the rest of the site they will be safe for future researchers.

We are again carefully excavating and planning the area of Room 2 – the remains are so complex that we need to ensure that the drawings and site records are adequate to the task of reconstructing them on paper and the computer screen back in the office.

It is clear that we are dealing with a bath-suite – a bathing range within a larger building. In the cold range we have removed some of the fill from both the inlet and outlet water channels – the northern one a stone-lined channel, the southern one a gap in the wall of Room 3 which presumably links with either the early stone-lined drain or later ditch. Both channels may have originally contained lead pipes, which like leadwork on many Roman sites would have been removed for reuse.

Designed by Corinne Mills 2005
email [email protected]

Planning and recording the wooden feature until lunchtime. Then pack the timber with the clay that was excavated from around it and backfilled to protect it for future excavations. In a way heartbreaking after 5 ½ weeks, but then again secure for the future.

I was really touched that Kat and Neil put a label in the clay with their initials AND mine, even though I was away with school kids at the time when the timber was found. Thanks guys, that meant a lot.

Neil Holbrook (Cotswold Archaeology, and site director for last years Time Team Big Dig) was onsite today and I think was more impressed with the site than he was last year.

Just goes to show.

Other news on the site. The cold plunge pool with the semi-circular apse and tiled floor has….
Another tiled floor about 30cm below . Making the lowest floor an earlier phase.

Plunge pool
showing tiled floor

Plunge pool
Showing earlier floor surface

Plunge pool
another angle

This bathhouse is proving, all ends up, to be a multi-phased site, the timber floor member that we preserved and backfilled, probably providing the date for the earliest phase. This has been really rewarding site.

A medium size piece of samian was found along side the timber and intriguingly some wood that looks like a sort of roman ply wood i.e. made from laminates of wood grains at 90° to each other.

An expert will be looking at this and it is being speculated that this is showing us the floor construction of an early, possible first phase flooring with strong construction, crossply surface over timber floor members, but I must stress this is a first stab interpretation but I have to admit I am very excited by this find as it will give us a lot more information than we really could have wished for. Loads of photos taken.
Right I’m going for a lie down

The timber

The timber

Kat

Cleaning up the timber with a small leaf trowel

Kat
Further cleaning

Timber
shot with scale

Timber
Larger shot with scale

Keeping it damp
Whilst the profile of the Roman god of the wood, Faunus, appears from the right side of the trench!!!

Thursday.
Sample taken for dendrochronology

X-section.
Going into macro mode

Bark is visible.
Rings and bark can be seen

X-section macro.
The rings and the medullary rays can be clearly seen

Ref.
4 reference points recorded so that a photo can be slotted into a plan of the site.

Official EH update for – Week 5 Day 2

Life gets even more interesting. Having got to the point where we are getting are thinking about how much we can hope to do before we finish digging – effectively on Sunday 18th July as the final week will largely be recording and backfilling we can perhaps see light at the end of the tunnel. In Trench 6 we have had to reduce the area of Room 1 that we are digging for safety, but in what was going to be the final piece of excavation in the room we have come across an in situ piece of wood. It is apparently part of a wooden beam set parallel with the south wall of the room and seems to be fairly well-preserved. The heated part of the bath house (Room 2) is being taken down and we have again found what might a later floor inserted into it after the heating system went out of use. We thought that Room 4 was part of the cold range of the bath house, but the presence of a possible in situ hypocaust tile and a box flue tile from near the wall may indicate that it was in fact a hot or warm room! In Room 6 we have excavated our late post hole and it has gone down nearly a metre. In Trench 7 we have completed the section and until next week will be doing no more in the trench until next week.

Designed by Corinne Mills 2005
email [email protected]

The last day of this week and time for an appraisal of our small area.

Finds from our area this week:- Bags of red painted plaster, plaster with impressed sea-shell, broken roof tile – tegula and imbrex, broken box flue tile some with plaster adhering to combed surfaces, Cu alloy pin attached to organic material, Cu alloy and Fe – possible decorative nail bosses, various Fe blades , fine silver (?) metalwork , substantial fine plain samian sherds, more pieces of decorated imitation samian bowl with hippocamp and acanthus figuring, “run-off” sprue from lead casting, various pieces of glass – both flat and shaped one a lovely aqua colour, huge great chunks of Dorset black burnished ware (we were averaging 1 ½ trays full of tile/pot a day), over 125 nails from the room and our 2 star finds – the beautiful glass base of an unguentarium and a lovely large green glass bead. I have a picture of the ungentarium but unfortunately not the bead. With glass you have to be quick to bag it up because it tends to deteriate and laminate. Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough with the bead to get a photo but I hope to get lots of post-excavation photos.

I hope I’ve remembered everything, if not Kat and Neil will give me a good kicking on Wednesday.

Wednesday there will be a slight change of strategy in “room one”. Because of a suspected feature elsewhere (about which I can say little more) It has been decided that we stop digging out the “find mine” and take a vertical strip down the soil adhering to the walls just to see what we have and how far it goes. Decisions based on the result of that investigation will determine what we do then.

Other things to mention about the trench as a whole is that there is one area which is being interpretated as a praefurnium (furnace room) from the extent of burning and proximity of the hypocaust fabric. But there is also another area with similar features adjacent and is either a second praefurnium, servicing the bathhouse at the same time, or one of a different period showing a change of use of one or more of the rooms. So we are acheiving the aim of the excavation and answering questions about the building. More from Wednesday

Conditions:- warm, sunny, gusts of wind.

Ok.. I am digging the SE corner of Trench 6 with Kat and Neil, a very rich trench in terms of finds and in terms of interpretations too.

Let’s start with Bryn and Bernard’s interpretation:-

A plunge pool of a bathhouse – later thought to be too big.

Then described as “deep room” – well, yes, I can vouch it is deep. But doesn’t really tell us any more :confused:

I find a piece of wall plaster with a sea shell impressed into it – we find 5 large pieces of a hippocamp decorated bowl (half horse half sea monster)

Is it a large plunge pool.

Don’t know – OK, now we call it “room 1”

Me, Neil and Kat find the base of a glass unguentarium (look it up, I had to )

Ooooh, back to plunge pool or another component of a bath suite. I wonder what it will be tomorrow

The base of the unguentarium was a wonderful find but later on, was almost rivalled by a single large green glass bead out of the same context.

It is terrible really as all the lovely pot bases and rims that usually you would rave about really are a secondary consideration. That how good this “plunge pool”, “deep room”, “room one”, “my, Kat’s and Neil’s SE corner” is. Last day of the week, tomorrow, I’ll take some more piccys of the finds and post them Monday.

Conditions:- warm, occasions showers, windy.
Day three already
Sam’s feature has been nicely cleaned and recorded. Just a matter of removing the stones from it. I stupidly volunteer to help remove one of the stones before setting eyes on it. Well, it is slightly larger than the planet Mercury and I was rather pleased to hear that it would probably be better left where it was.

As if I didn’t have enough to do anyway.

Unfortunatly the Total Station, used for 3D recording of small finds was on the blink, or rather the battery charger for it was. So instead of recording all small finds immediatly, we had to white tag the finds in the area until we could get the Total Station batteries charged.

As I’ve hinted 😀 the area I’m working in has produced proportionally more small finds and the white finds tags are making it increasingly difficult to work the area. Because we are 3D’ing we’ve got white tags on little pillars of soil while we try to work around them. Still it didn’t stop me finding more glass, loads of pot – including part of the Hippocamp (“My Little Pony”) figured imitation Samian ware, fine plain real Samian, loads of nails (now over 100 out of our small area), possible fine silver metalwork, “run-off” sprue from lead casting, and copper alloy pin “thing” possibly attached to leather or wood (the context [5021] is very damp and ideal for preserving organic matter) This find caused Jörn (small finds specialist) to rush it back to Portsmouth to the labs for analysis.

So all in all a very rewarding day – apart from my “trouser moment”.
Advice to anyone on a dig – always pack a spare pair of trousers or like I do live only 50 metres from the site. I would not have liked to carry on the way they were split. The girls would have been frightened and the boys would have felt inadequate, and not to mention the health and safety aspect of the danger of tripping over things in the trench

Up bright and early, not too stiff, just a little writers cramp from recording all those small finds.

As I have said previously Sam and I worked together last year on the Big Dig, and while I’ve got the suggested plunge pool with a myriad of finds, Sam has been digging, down and down and down, into what has been suggested is a drain. And I think it’s safe to say that this area “hasn’t really troubled the small finds experts”

I let slip that I was writing this diary (on the Other Place) and Sam will be looking in again tonight . What I can say is that her “feature” was cleaned and tidied up immaculately for drawing and recording.
It does always worry me when the female archaeologist is asked to tidy a trench or a feature. I have visions of stones and pot and bits of wall being placed in drawers never to be seen again. (ducks and runs ). I always fear the dreaded words from my wife “I’ve tidied up your study” which is roughly translated as “all the stuff you knew you could put your hand on immediately, you will never, ever see again”
Still I don’t suppose it helps when I shout across to Sam, “another bit of glass”, “hey Sam, you seen this huge Black Burnished ware rim”

A beautiful tiled, floor surface was uncovered today with what looks to be a semi-circular alcove. I got some shots but will take more when it is fully cleaned up.

Various post holes keep appearing and seem to have been cut into many features. These have been suggested as being evidence of a Saxon building over the top of the roman. A bit early for interpretation yet, but I’ll keep all you Anglo-Saxon experts “posted” (Ooooh!!)

Anyway to really hack Sam off :p – my star find today in Trench six was a piece of wall plaster with what looks like a deliberate attempt to decorate with an impressed sea shell. Interesting because of the plunge pool theory. Bryn Walters was on site and reckons we still have a metre to go before we reach the floor but it is slow going because of the wealth of finds (Sorry Sam)
More tomorrow.

WHAT A ROOM. Plaster on the walls, soil kept on to protect it till we’ve emptied it out completely, red painted lumps of plaster in the debris. Massive amount of pot, last week half a figured Samian vessel decorated with acanthus leaves and a hippocamp – a kind of sea monster, half horse half fish – not quite a dragon , but hey I’m easily impressed. This was Kat’s star find and we are currently looking for the other half of what Kat calls her “My Little Pony” pot. Bless her.
Last week, in this room Kat and Neil found what was the remains of roman footware, probably a sandal. All the leather was gone but the hobnails remained and traced out the shape of the sole. This week building nails seem to be the order of the day. Today out of 34 small finds (that does not include pot, tile, plaster etc) 29 have been nails. It makes for boring reading on the small finds bags.

Site Code – 3641 2004 Site Name – Groundwell SSD- Trench 6 Context Number – 5021 SF Number – 7808 Material – Fe

Object – Another $%&&*! Nail

Still, why are we complaining this is a rich room indeed. Apart from the nails, two trays of various pot, I’d say about 30 significantly large pieces just today. And testament to my mattocking technique — my star find of today was a very fine piece of roman glass, the rim of a delicate vessel, about 3cm x 1cm, mattocked out by my own fair hands with no further breakage. Although praised for the find and delicate mattock work I think they were being over generous — more luck than judgement I’d say, but I did feel good. Roman glass.

A great first day, excellent finds and the whole site seems to be coming together although still very hard to interpret. Close up photos taken

Designed by Corinne Mills 2005
email [email protected]

Conditions: Cloudy, sustained periodic sunshine, few small showers, very windy.

After yesterdays postponement due to Wimbledonesque weather today is the first of the primary school mock excavations.

The day of truth for Dawn and the Outreach crew.

Is the first school going to resemble St. Recidivist’s School for Persistent Offenders with pupils “refreshingly unhindered by conventional education. Have you got to keep your eye on the Landy to make sure it doesn’t get TWOC’ed? (Taken without owners consent, I am reliably informed).
Do we have to worry about the electronic tags, being worn by a miniature version of the Kray twins, throwing out the GPS readings, or the ropes of 9ct gold “bling” round the 10 year old homeboys neck skewing the magnetometry results in the demonstration being given to the trainees?

Nah, no such problems. In fact these kids are loving it. They are split into groups and one lot go off walking the wider site as part of their landscape survey, looking at the terracing and platforms and the “lumps ‘n’ bumps”. One group are taught how to recognise finds (specifically roman :- box flue, tegula, rim sherds etc). One group excavate in the mock-up and another group record the finds on a grid. Many comments are heard from the kiddywinks along the lines of :- “I’ve seen this done on Time-Team” and “Oi, get outta my trench, Tony”

I really can’t praise English Heritage enough for this initiative although I can’t help but feel that they are not fully exploiting the positive publicity they could be getting out of this. Publicity that could be used to attract business sponsors for future initiatives.

Anyway this is the last update from me for a couple of days. When I return Monday evening I will update you with anything I can. (If I have survived ) and by Wednesday evening I’ll be able to give you a full report from within trench 6 and hopefully will be utilising the latest technology exploited in the shape of trench cam. OK, it’s my Fujifilm digital, but used at an alluring angle.