..and soon we face the final spade full. As always the end of a dig is a mad rush and all hands on deck, hence the lack of daily updates these last few days. My heavy troweling skills were needed to help clean the site back for final photographs and drawings. 🙂
Hannah and Harriet cleaning back the mortar floors
But first I had to do a ‘watching brief’ on two holes at the back of the new building so that new lightening rod mats could be attached to the building. A watching brief is where an archaeologist watches others dig holes and records what they find as the hole is dug and draws sections before it is filled in again. As the villa is a scheduled monument under protection from English Heritage, we have to get permission to dig anywhere on site and have archaeological excavations or watching brief to report back our findings to them.
Paul digging the first hole
Dave and Paul came out to do the work and did a fantastic job, they even found larger pieces of pottery than we have done on site!
Dave and Paul with the two rim sherds they found
The site is looking spick and span and all the features (post holes, ditches and walls) show up well. A site clean means defining all the layers so we can see colour and texture changes.
A lovely clean site
Martin drawing and recording the site
Back filling time is nearly upon us 😦 but as always the last day brings an interesting find or two, the next post will reveal all!
Archaeology National Trust SW 
When will you be back filling?
Hi Jenny, We finished backfilling at 6 last night, we could have dug a little bit more but as we still had the students who were younger and fitter than the two of us, we filled in the dig in the afternoon. Now we start on the post excavation work and seeing what all the layers are telling us 🙂