Although the excavations officially finished on Friday with the donators, there was still a little work left to do by Alex and Lauren, this was really just tidying up and recording the remains that we didn't get chance to finish last week. First of all, there was still a little bit of fill remaining in the ditch, so Alex cleaned it out and slowly the ditch bottom emerged from the earth!
Meanwhile, Lauren drew the sections on permatrace. This is special recording paper that can be drawn on in the rain. This was very helpful today as it never stopped pouring! These scale drawings will be digitised and used in the project report.
Then the ditch section was cleaned up and photographed. In the picture you can see the different soils that make up the fill of the ditch, these are all given different numbers and described individually and help us to understand if the ditch had silted up or was deliberately backfilled.
Some wider shots were also taken, so that other features could be placed in context with the ditch. For example there are two post holes cut into the side of the ditch on the left hand side. You can just make out the small circular shapes.
Here they are, closer, we are not sure what these would have been used for. Possibly it was a fence?
Then a photograph was taken of the rubble that Andrew had put in one of his holes. You can see that he had literally dug straight into the top of the ditch itself! Even these modern features are recorded, this is to demonstrate that they were there and we are not making things up!
And finally a picture that should have been on Friday's blog is this tiny fragment of possibly Roman glass debutage, it was found by Thomas when he was in the bottom of the ditch on Friday afternoon! Is it the find of the excavation!?
And that is it! The site is all recorded and finished off, again, Elmet would like to express our thanks to both Andrew and Lindsay for putting up with a bunch of scruffy archaeologists all week!
Brilliant end to the project - what a lovely ditch profile. Rock cut...those Romans were nails!
ReplyDeleteAny more pottery come from the bottom full that was removed?
I'm pretty confident that Glass is Roman and it's come from. Secure context, so I think it might we'll be the fimd of the dig!
Well done Elmet and well done all the crowd funders. Lindsey and Andrew, you've been awesome letting this happen and you can be proud that you've contributed a very important piece of the jigsaw to the puzzle that is Swinton in the Roman period
No, unfortunately, no more pottery was found in the bottom fills, but we did find enough on Friday to date the ditch securely.
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