The end of another great week. Today more features were being discovered, and causing Pete more headaches and there is really only next week left to dig, for the final week is reserved for backfilling. The building speaks for itself, it needs a lot more work done on it and hopefully EH can come up with the funding, but with like everything – money is tight and this seven weeks at Groundwell has taken a rather large slice of the Centre for Archaeology’s budget. And as I say this is only one building of a complex of several on this site.
Today I carefully exposed, cleaned and recorded a concretion of nails and other iron artefacts hard against a wall, possibly the contents of a bag of some sort of which parts could remain. So after cleaning and photographing in situ, it was block lifted to be excavated in the lab looking for fabric, fibres or organic matter. I was quite pleased with that delicate job.
Then me, Kat and Neil took the soil covering the walls of our room back to about 2cm away from the inside faces so that on Wednesday when we expose the plaster we can work quickly to strip the remaining soil and record the exposed room before the plaster deteriorates and maybe falls.