Roman Swinton Day 4, 9 October 2014

Today began with dry weather and stayed the same throughout apart from a couple of showers. For once, the weather forecast was correct!  We were joined on site by Jeanette and Ruth, neither of whom had participated in any archaeological work before. We were also joined by Peter Robinson from the Doncaster Museum, he was on holiday and wanted to have a dig with us!

It wasn't long before we began finding Roman pottery. In fact, Jeanette found this piece of Rusticated Ware within in minutes of starting work!

You can see the pattern on the pottery, it was created by using a wet sponge on the clay as the pot was drying:

Then Jeanette and Ruth were shown by Lauren the correct way of excavating features, these were some of the remains the team had been working on the day before.

Then in the middle of the morning BBC Radio Sheffield turned up in the guise of Andy Kershaw who interviewed the team about the project.

Meanwhile, Peter helped by finishing off the feature that Adam had begun the day before. This had produced a couple of pieces of Roman pottery and it looks as though it is a post hole, with a pit dug around it to remove the post. You may be able to see the very circular part of the post hole in the bottom of the bigger pit:

This was then cleaned up and archaeologically recorded by with photographs which will all go into the archive and be used to write the report!

Then Andrew came home from work and was also interviewed by the BBC! We wouldn't be so cruel to suggest that he has a face for radio...

Whilst all this excitement was happening, Peter continued recording the post hole, here he is filling in context sheets that will go into the archive:

The finds kept coming from the north end of the trench, Jeanette must have been a pottery magnet! She kept finding lots of grey ware cooking pots from the feature she was digging. We lost count of the amount of sherds she had recovered by the end of the day!

For the last part of the day Andrew joined us and helped by removing a layer of orangey brown sand, to see if there was a cleaner natural sand below. This was in the area of the sondage that was started yesterday.

Sue also joined in the fun in the afternoon, which meant that we had a busy little trench full of archaeologists!

Day four is over, we have more Roman pottery and a couple of definite features that we are thinking are from the Roman period. We have one more day on the site and will spend a lot of that emptying out the features that we have identified and recording them. Stay tuned for tomorrow's updates!