| Entry: | Still here!
Myself and Dave are here to dig B60 and 59 which at the end of the season revealed a very nice painted wall. The new shelter foundation for the 4040 area would go right through this, so our aim is to assess the size and lifespan of this building in order to inform future excavation strategies for this building.
Well we've been at it for just over a week now and have defined the extent of both buildings, it took us a while as we had to extend the 4040 west by nearly 5m and coincidently our southern limit was the same as that for the 1993-4 scrape; It had puzzled me all the biros, bits of crisp paper and blue string following the edge I was trying to cut!
Not much of B60 remained and was excavated quickly. The north west part of B59 below was truncated by some shallow but wide pits, these were whipped out (in an appropriate archaeological manner of course ), as speed was of the essence.
Now we've had a couple of hard days hacking out the room fill, at first we thought we'd have it out in a couple of days but once we'd done a day and realised how much we could move it became clear we had made a slight under estimation. Nevermind. We knew it was big at 8m EW and 7.5ish NS but it's not till you're down in it that the scale is tangible, thankfully Mike and Marina had dug out half at the end of the season.
We dig in the west in the morning and the east later as we haven't got round to extending the shelter covers, hopefully it will take the weight as a post was removed as it was in the middle of the building, seems to be holding up so far, thanks to Ibrahim's props. Today is two and a half days of digging roomfill and we have stated to come down onto platforms one in the south and one in the NW and a bin on the west wall, also bits of plaster with what could be black pigment on it have been throughout the fill raising our hopes for more painted walls!
Anyway should be good tomorrow.
After several days of a very quiet and unpopulated dig house the Baird team have arrived, so things are not so quiet now, once again doors slamming in the corridors, ahh the familiar catal sounds!Entered By: Simon McCann |
