| Entry: | Have been really busy trying to keep up with paperwork as we attempt to get ready for shoring before Lindsay arrives. Have just managed to finish excavating to the required depth today which is just over 1001m OD, now we just need to photograph and draw lots of sections.
The group of deposits that we have excavated recently have proved quite interesting. As well as the normal middens which are a bit different there are a number of deposits provisionally interpreted as lime burning. These consist of very distinctive light coloured mottled deposits made up of burnt lime and other material lying over thin black bands of scorching :
4872
4876 / 4877
4880
5274
5276 / 5277
5281
It therefore looks like we have intermittent lime burning in an outside area where general material is being dumped. If this is correct I imagine that this means that the settlement is some distance away as lime burning is not something that you do in the immediate vicinity of buildings. This agrees with some of the artefacts from higher up such as the bones which may indicate an off-site butchery area. It is not clear which if any of the lime burning events are in-situ. They all have the scorching underneath and the fact that they are not obviously broken up suggests that they may all be in-situ. The alternative is that they were dumped whilst still hot which seems unlikely as I would expect them to be less well preserved if this is the case. However, the scorching seems a bit too slight for the temperatures required. The source of the lime is unclear. There is certainly some stone present and we do get limestone on site. Some of the deposits also contain heavily burnt bone and it has been noticeable that the recent layers have had more shell, especially whole shells, than is typical, so we are probably looking at a variety of sources. The dumps contain preserved sheep/goat dung pellets which were presumably being used a s fuel although wood was probably being used as well. It is unclear if there were any structures associated with the lime burning. We have found a roughly circular shallow gully [5269], a post-pad (4883) and a bedding layer (5279) which could conceivably be associated with lime burning (5276) / (5277) although this requires some special pleading with regard to the stratigraphy concerning the removal of the structure that was in the gully it is possible. There was also a distinctive filled in hollow (5283) and clay dump (5282) which may be related to lime burning (5281). I am unsure about the technicalities of lime burning but the evidence so far suggests that there may be only very minimal transitory structures associated with it. It also looks like the burning is on quite a small scale, possibly only enough for a single building? It presumably relates to the hard whit plaster c5mm thick with red paint on it that we have been turning up throughout the space 181 sequence.
Now we stop to draw and put in shoring and wait while most people are away for a few days before the final big push to the base of the mound which should be just under two metres away. It should all be over by October!Entered By: Craig Cessford |
