by Ben Bright, William Taylor, Lana Crocher

 

Trench number:  9

 On the first day of our last week, we began creating a sondage on the southwest side of the trench within the roundhouse. The aim here was to explore the possibility of a later fort preserved beneath the roundhouse, however, at a depth of about 1m, it was determined to be a natural clay deposit with no clear sign of occupation. In addition to this, we dug a slot around a larger stone within the roundhouse to investigate whether this was a feature of interest. It was supposed that this may have been a left-over structural component of a platform which held up the hearth.

 We continued removing rubble from the outside of the east facing reveting wall of the round house. This was to facilitate OSL dating (optically stimulated luminescence dating) which is a method through which samples are taken and the approximate date at which they were last exposed to sunlight is determined. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent digging deeper in the same spot to determine if the reveting wall had been built on an early structure and to gain a better understanding of how the stratigraphy lines up with the rest of the trench. Samples of clay were taken during this time for further analysis. It was determined that there was likely no earlier structure. Thursday was spent creating a section drawing of the west facing trench wall opposite the east facing roundhouse wall and potential entrance to the roundhouse. A kubiena tin was used to take a further soil sample from the trench wall for use in monolith sampling. Thursday saw the first backfilling with tarpaulin being laid over the archaeology to separate it from the backfill if the site is subject to another archaeological dig in the future.

In the lower part of the trench the metalled surface was removed in a sectioned trench it revealed a layer of larger cobbled stone in a clay deposit. This cobble deposit was removed in a sondage just inside the enclosure gate, with samples being taken, it was determined that we had reached the natural clay surface being found across the site. The next day we removed the rampart stone on the innermost side of the enclosure to (a) take samples of the rampart core (b) to investigate if the cobbled surface went under the rampart which would have suggested an earlier phase of the settlement, they did not, and (c) section the end of the rampart and posthole for recording. During the core sampling some unidentified bone was found that hopefully aids in dating.

Thursday and Friday were spent recording finds, section drawing and backfilling.

OSL sampling

Section drawing

Backfilled like we were never here…well, a little trampled.