It appeared that not a lot happened yesterday but cleaning of a possible mortared floor and a possible “decorated” floor surface seemingly slowed down the spectacular progress. Small finds are turning up and the first coin of this years dig is still waiting to be identified.
David Hunter, site supervisor, collared me. Needs to transfer some money to his wife for nursery fees and book a flight to Edinburgh for an interview (and they say there is no money in Archaeology 
) So he needs to use the internet and can he pop over. Well I ain’t going to say no, am I?
But I started thinking (yes, I know it’s dangerous 
) it’s is getting scary how reliant we, as a whole, are on technology. When your working base is a portacabin – and there are no BT land lines because we all use mobile phones now, and in these temporary structures the “bean counters” have decided that there is no need for internet connections to be easily (or relatively cheaply) available – you seem to be divorced from “civilization”.
Ask yourself the question how did we cope 10 years ago. Without internet access, “portable” mobile phones, online banking, online booking, online everything. Well, the truth is very well actually. But it seems – as technology evolves we humans forget how we ever did without it.
But then again, not every establishment is consumed by the white heat of technological revolution.
Today I think I’ll investigate Trench 7.
bowl Kat reveals nicely shaped bowl
bowl 2
bowl 3
rim
Official EH update for Week 1 – Day 4
Although we have made good progress today, yesterday I was perhaps a little optimistic regarding the completion of machining in Trench 6. We have got most of the infill of the 1996 road-scrape out, but we will need a machine for a little longer to finish clearing the road, tidy up the eastern edge of the trench and spoil heap. Dave Hunter has volunteered to work on Monday (part of our ‘site-weekend’) to complete the machining – Thank you Dave! In Trench 6 we have started to clean back by hand from the Roman wall we have exposed in the south-western corner of the trench, but it is already obvious that we are going to be faced with the same problems that we had last year with the site drying out and all soil-colours turning to grey! Large sheets of polythene may be the answer. In the south-eastern corner we again speculating that we may have the western part of Bernard and Bryn’s trial trench from 1997.
Trench 7 is looking good, small patches of gravel on the surface of the mound that we think may represent the road suggest that the interpretation may be correct. Interestingly in the road mound, or agger, we can see quantities of burnt clay, or possibly daub from the walls of demolished timber buildings, although we have no evidence of structures in the trench