| Entry: | End of week and we have managed to finish drawing sections, dry sieving and got paperwork up to date for space 181. Everything is now ready for the next stage of digging after the shoring has been erected. We would seem to have around 1.8m still to go and by the time the shoring goes up we will realistically have no more than six weeks to dig and record it in. An obviously tight schedule but one we should just about manage as long as we don’t find anything spectacular. I hope the shoring goes well and that the logistics don’t get too much worse.
Seeing the whole 2m section cleaned up was great and really emphasised the changing nature of the space through time from stabling to midden with intermittent burning to less artefact rich dumping of material intermittent ‘lime burning’. I still have no real idea how long a time period we are looking at - years, decades, centuries? I have seen Medieval urban sequences in Britain where that depth of accumulation takes several hundred years. Artefactually we have apparently gone aceramic, clay balls have a poorer fabric, the plaster is different, the animal species are different, shell is more common and the obsidian technology may be changing. All in all we are seeing quite a lot of change in material culture. There is also the question of how close we are to buildings, I have the impression that as we get earlier the nearest buildings are getting further and further away and that by now we are in some really peripheral area which is effectively outside the settlement. This makes changes in material culture really difficult to understand, how much of what we are seeing is change through time and how much is a reflection of different depositional patterns in an area that is effectively outside the settlement?Entered By: Craig Cessford |
