| Entry: | First diary entry. Arrived on site on the 04/06/06. After some weeding began a large scale clean up of the South area. It turned out to be rather a useful exercise to familiarise myself with the archaeology. It suddenly seemed like a long time since I'd been out. We decided to make a start on removing the sandbags from the Western strip of the 4040. Once it was all clean I started to excavate a late- presumably Byzantine burial to the South of building 41- the large Byzantine strucure. The feature number of this burial was F 1467. The skeleton (unit 12398) was in very poor condition but and lifted badly. There were no grave goods.
After a gap from digging to put up the shelter over the 4040- and very lovely it looks- I started to excavate what appeared to be a gap in the fill (12629) of the large foundation - B 41 (12630). There was a clear loose deposit of about a metre, later measured to be equidistant along the southern wall of the building. Doru and I thought it might be the entrance to the building and were hoping for evidence of a threshold. However, the deposit just kept going and reached the depth of the rest of the foundation. I had an awful thought that it might have been a previously excavated and backfilled slot, but knew it couldn't have been. Later we realised that there was a row of mud-bricks two or three courses deep on either side of the gap. Just bottomed the cut today so still working on theories as to what it represents. More numbers, and hopefully ideas, to follow…Entered By: MCD
Maria Duggan |
