Roman Swinton Day 3, 8 October 2014

The day began cold and misty, but it soon burned off to give us some sunshine this afternoon. However, this turned into rain for the late afternoon, but this is where the marquee showed its worth again! The first thing to do was the clean the trench from yesterday to show where the cuts from Andrew's holes were. We then photographed the cleaned surface.

Once this had been completed, John and Adam began clearing out the rubble filled pits, the reason for this was that we knew that they were recently made and it would also give us a good idea of how deep the sand layer was!

Lauren began excavating another feature that was identified in the trench and almost immediately found a piece of Roman pottery! It looked like some grey cooking ware and was very encouraging!

Then seconds later, Adam found a second piece of Roman pottery! This came from a feature that was not dug by Andrew!

It was a small piece of rounded Grey Ware, again, probably from a cooking or storage pot.

In the afternoon, Sue joined us and began excavating a sondage (a small trench designed to answer a specific question) through the sand layer. The question to answer was if this was the natural sand layer or a layer above that.

Meanwhile, Adam continued emptying the feature he had found the Roman pottery in. John and Alex also started widening the trench to see if they could spot where Andrew had dug one of his holes and to see if there was any archaeological features in that particular area.

So the trench was alive with activity all afternoon!

Then Adam struck it lucky again! Another piece of Roman pottery! This time it was a rim sherd, from the top of the pot, a really nice piece!

Then the rain fell outside the tent whilst Alex and John opened up a bit more of the trench, this will be continued in the morning and hopefully will have some interesting archaeology!

So, we have had our first pieces of Roman dated pottery, so we know we are in the right place! Tomorrow we will clean the newly opened areas and see if there are any features there and excavate what we find! It is starting to look very promising!