Roman Swinton Day 1, 6 October 2014

The day began with a massive downpour which lasted most of the day, with a small clearance in the afternoon. Despite the rain, John arrived at site with Lauren and Alex and the garden looked something like this:

The first job was to lay out the trench, we decided that a 5m long by 2m wide trench would be sufficient for the time being, this is an archaeological evaluation, not a full excavation. The four corners were marked out with red flags and we laid out tarpaulin to put the soil on from our digging. This wasn't a long job at all and soon we were ready to go!

The first task was to remove the top soil and turf, this was pretty easy as it was quite new growth. Then Lauren and John cleaned back the surface with trowels, we do this so that we can see the changes in soil colours and textures which may give us a good idea of the archaeological deposits below the surface. However, in this case, we were still quite high up in the stratigraphic horizons (layers of dirt!) and we were finding lots of modern material such as pottery and metal items.

Then John turned into a Viking warrior with the mattock! He was using the tool to break up the soil quicker, but still being able to watch for any artefacts that may become dislodged.

By the end of the first day our artefact collection was mostly modern material, such as pottery and glass. That is because we are still working through the upper layers of soil and these bits and pieces were probably dropped when previous tenants were working in the garden.

And finally, by the end of the afternoon we had erected the marquee over the working area; this was to keep the rain off us as we worked and also to protect any archaeological deposits overnight.

Even despite the best intentions of the rain, we managed to get a lot done in the first day, this is really encouraging for the rest of the week and tomorrow we will definitely be a lot drier!

Check back tomorrow for more updates as they happen!