Roman Swinton Day 2, 7 October 2014

The rain was falling as we got on site this morning, but this is where the marquee proved its worth! Not having to work in bulky waterproof jackets is always a plus! We were joined by Bev from Scunthorpe, who also works in the museum part time and was very interested in seeing how an archaeological excavation was carried out. It was her first time on a site!

John also joined us, having not been put off by yesterday's deluge! The two of them cleaned back the first layer of earth that we encountered under the topsoil. This was a mix of garden soil and some rubble, but we had to clean it with trowels to see if there was any archaeological deposits cut into it. 

This was then photographed, using the archaeological scales each measuring one metre. Archaeology is destructive, so everything has to be recorded. One of those ways is by photographs, like we did here. You may be able to make out that this layer of earth is very mixed, with brown and sandy patches, that is because this has probably been disturbed over recent years when the garden was dug! Also, all the finds in this layer were from modern dates, so we were pretty sure there are no Roman remains here!

The next task was to remove this mixed up garden soil and find the next layer. Here, Bev shovelled off the garden soils which proved to be very solid and they had to be broken up with a mattock first!

As we mattocked down through the buried soils, a bright yellow sand layer was soon exposed. This could be an undisturbed surface and may have archaeological features present in it. But there was a lot of work to do before we would see anything like that!

You can make out the sandy layer at the bottom of this picture, obviously this still has a lot of trampled dirt on it and it will need a good clean with a trowel when it has all been taken off, but progress is being made!

One of Andrew's relatives, Chris, was visiting and he continually brought cups of tea to a very appreciative work force. For some reason, Alex ended up getting this cup...

The rest of the crew were definitely not lazy and more and more of the sandy layer was exposed with a lot of hard work and muck shifting! It actually rose up from quite deep at one end of the trench to the other, but that is because the site is on a slope anyway. We also began to see where Andrew had dug some holes to dump rubbish, which had led to the discovery of the pottery in the first place!

As was mentioned before, the finds from the garden soils were mostly modern, some glazed pottery and a clay pipe. Bev was very interested in the assemblage, because of her work in the museum, but we still have a way to go before we, hopefully, recover older material.

So today was much drier in the end, the rain held off for most of the day and with John and Bev's great help we moved loads of muck! Tomorrow, we hope to empty out the rubble pits that Andrew dug, which may give us a good indication of how deep he found the first pieces of pottery. There will be further updates tomorrow!