| Entry: | Craig 2-8-99
Quite a good day, the first in a while. Re-read yesterdays diary, boy was I in a bad mood. Today I feel much better and although I still believe all the thing that I said yesterday I would probably word them a bit more circumspectly, never mind this is multivocality in action as we get my views on different days and I shouldn’t censor the person I was yesterday.
The shoring is now up and secure although it still needs a bit of work especially with regard to packing it with soil filled sacks. We began to remove the deep sounding fill, lots of nice finds including a stone mace-head or loom-weight and a big obsidian rough-out. There is lots of collapsed wall down there, it is also getting more regular and it looks like we have got below the level of collapse/slumping and have the outline of the original deep sounding. The only pain is that we can’t dig the eastern end for safety reasons. At the western end we started at 1001.76m OD there was a fair amount of midden then at c.1001.25m OD we revealed a very distinct white ?lime rich? deposit with associated burning and other things. This definitely appears to be some form of distinct activity horizon, possibly lime burning? The layers beneath this are less distinct and we may be back into midden. The lowest depth reached was 1000.76m OD.
We are not presently digging the area of core 1 but core 2 turns out to have been almost at the edge of the deep sounding which partly explains why it was more confused than core 1. Core 2 showed deep sounding/archaeology down to 999.33m OD and definite archaeology to 999.22m OD, core 1 showed the base of the deep sounding and the commencement of archaeology at 1000.53m OD. In fact core 2 went into archaeology at over 1000m OD. We will have to wait until tomorrow but it looks like the coring was broadly correct.
One problem is that with the shoring hoisting buckets has become more difficult, I think that this is just a foretaste of the logistical problems to come. Even if we empty the deep sounding tomorrow it will probably take at least another day simply to shift the soil. What with this and more shoring to go in, plus the necessity of spending quite a lot of time drawing good sections as these are vital, I think that we are really going to have to dig fast as everything else is going to use up a lot of time.
Hopefully tomorrows instalment will record the emptying out of the deep sounding and the death of (4194).Entered By: Craig Cessford |
