| Entry: | A fairly successful day. All the elevations were finished so we got back to removing infilling. In the south-east corner of space 154 we removed just over 0.4m [making a total of 0.7m] and came down onto the tops of some features, we will need to get lower before we can tell what they are. Also in space 157 we only took off a small skim before revealing the top of a feature. So far it looks as if preservation in Building 5 will be good. Perhaps by the end of this week we will have come down to the level were features begin to appear in all the spaces. The priority tour on pit F.223 failed to come up with any evidence about what was removed. Went to the meeting on Trashing Rubbish last night, some interesting ideas but I was vaguely disappointed. The discussion of middens seems rather behind the times as our understanding of their utilisation in the Medieval period, where we are aided by documentary sources, seems to have been much better explored. It also looks like the paper will be very ‘lab specialist’ dominated with the ‘field archaeologists’ simply expected to supply basic categories and lists of unit numbers which the ‘lab specialists’ will then interpret and understand through the artefacts. This is symptomatic of a fairly widespread view on the project, which seems to be that the main aim of the excavation is to provide a series of nice assemblages of artefacts for specialists to study.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
