Another busy week

Firstly I might as well give you my latest extract of field diary. You might notice that it’s a bit lazy and that’s because I really am rather knackered after such a long week!

Week 2 Field Diary
Things are going really well on site; we have shifted through the top soil and have reached things that could actually be called archaeological. I have made a pretty good find and the rest of my group have found 4 cobbled standings that could actually be the standing for a small building. All of this happened in the last two days of this week, the first two days being important but quite monotonous clearings of top soil.

I have been working in the very corner of my trench, pretty much on my own remit as Alex has let me dig a trench through the topsoil to see what was going on in it. At the very end of it in the corner there is some kind of pit that seems to be full of roman rubbish but time will have to tell on what it is exactly and how big/deep it is as all we managed to do on Friday was shift the top soil once it was decided that it was all pretty worthless. This took the whole day but by the end of it we can see some features and interactions in the soil.

Right, on a social aspect things are ticking along nicely, I had my first social as Social Sec on Wednesday and it was a really big success. Everyone had a great time and more importantly told me that it was as good as they expected it to be!

People are also on board with my plans for the rest of the term so that’s good. I might add some more to this later on in the weekend but its very very hot here and I have had a very busy week!

A busy week!

Updates

Gosh, what a week it has been! It really doesn’t feel like that long since my last update to you guys but looking back I have been so busy and a lot has happened to me so I guess it’s just best to jump in and update on what’s been going on!

Field work wise things have been quite hard going but very rewarding. There’s nothing quite like going to bed at the end of a long day of hard physical work, nor the end of a week were you feel that you have accomplished quite a lot.

On day one we were briefed on general site safety, procedure and practice and got stuck into getting some of the topsoil out of our trench, not a lot was ‘found’ in he typical sense of the first day but I felt it was valuable non the less to get my eye in to seeing the difference in soil levels (which is difficult) and to spot finds in the earth (which can be frustrating) The first day ended with me feeling muddy and sore but with a real sense of what archaeology was about.

Tuesday morning however I felt awful! I was sore all over and was still exhausted from the day before. Despite this I actually learnt a lot more and also got a lot deeper through the loam towards the sub soil and the actual finds. On that front today I found a piece of worked bronze, possibly an old broken broach as well as a fair bit of bone and Samian ware, however I did not feel that we were finding as much as we could that day compared to the other group working in our trench, possibly due to the fact that we were slightly above them in relation to finding the top of the sub soil. Unfortunately we were rained off by about 2 ‘o’ clock that day menai9ng we could not finish our drag bit of the top soil

Wednesday was a field trip which was informative and interesting however if I am totally honest I was not at my best that day as the coach journey was enough to lull me both into lethargy and then sleep due to the strenuousness of the two days before.

However the evening of that day was important for a totally non archaeological reason. It was Ben Lairig election nights. I won’t bore you with a blow buy blow (and to be honest I don’t remember it all at all) but the long and the short of it is that I am now the Social Sec for Ben Lairig! This couple with me being general Secretary for the new movie society I founded this year means I will be very busy socially next year!

Thursday was a shame and a washout as we were sent home at 11 due to torrential rain having only scraped back about half of what we needed to do.

Friday was a good day in all although my actual personal number of finds was close to none, enough that my section was checked about 3 times by varying members of the department before it was classed as ‘just empty’. That coupled with the fact that it was about a foot and a half above the beginnings of the sub soil and well above the rest of the trench meant that by the end of the day I was learned to dig a sub trench through it to see what it did.

In the interest of full disclosure I was very tired and possibly a bit disillusioned by this point so it was not the straightest piece in the world but I will tidy it up on Monday and also have shifted about half of it. Although today not the most inspiring day of my dig I feel it was the most important as I feel that I now know I could do this, even when it is frustrating!

So a busy but great week for me, one that I feel I might have grown and learnt more than any other apart from maybe my first week at York!

Keep on ticking by!

Socially it’s been a good week as well with two very decent nights out on Wednesday and Thursday, Ben Lairig and Nick’s birthday respectively. It was nice to relax after some hard days work and both nights were just what I needed.

I also saw the Star Trek film on Wednesday as well. It was a good film even if I don’t really know my phasers from my photons!

A quiet weekend lays ahead before 3 weeks of excavation proper.

Sorry for the 3 posts when one would ahve done but as the blog originaly posted itself 4 times it was easier to edit it into 4!

Keep on ticking by!

Field Work Diary Day 5

Rounding off the pre-excavation work was a field trip to a cemetery to do some graveyard survey work. This involves taking down all the details of a grave and marking it off on a map. And I mean all the details ranging from the obvious like the occupant and time of internment to the type and material of the grave as well as the typeface of the inscription. It was an interesting and varied day if not a little sobering at times due to the subject matter.

One grave that stood out to me particularly was a family tomb as the dates really told a story. One son dies in the Somme in World War One. His brother is then killed in India during active duty in World War Two. The father of the family dies about 6 days later at home, seemingly from grief. 8 years later the daughter of the family dies, presumably unmarried and childless before finally the mother of the family dies less than 5 years after that.

Other than that it was a good day and it was also nice to see photography used as a backup to our records, especially as my sketches were a bit poor! !

Keep on ticking by!

First I’ll put up my field work diary, then I’ll add the more personal stuff at the end.

Field Work Diary Day 4

Today was the second day of survey work for me, focusing on using and picking up on the changes in the magnetic field of the earth to try and find features in the ground. Magnetometry is brilliant as it can pick up things that are not there any more but were at one time such as trenches and post holes.

The whole day was really good fun and very informative. I found that I had the knack of walking at the speed of the beeps down perfectly which was nice. Apart from spending the day in shorts while being up to my waist in nettles and thistles (due to the rule that you have to have no metal on you when you do the survey) the day was a good one and taught me that although survey can be a little repetitive in nature it can also be enjoyable as well as useful.

Not what I expected

So I’m actually sitting on my Uni bed at the moment, as opposed to the expected halfway up a Munro or in the Clachaig drinking an inordinate amount of beer. And while the next part of this extract may seem very upbeat (and it is) let me be very clear sunstroke is dangerous, sucks to have and I’ve never felt so ill in recent years. However today has been a very good day.

I woke up today feeling much better, to the point that I realised how ill I’d been the past couple of days. A drink in the provost’s garden to celebrate 40 years of Goodricke college followed by watching York crush Lancaster in Rugby but more importantly in the entire Roses competition!

So a good day, even if it was not the day I expected.

(Though it does suck to miss the Goodricke 40th anniversary Ball as I expected to be in Scotland and thus did not get a ticket!)

Quick, and lazy update

Here is an extract form my field diary as it is the easiest way to update you guys as I now find myself super busy

Day Two

I was at the church in Micklegate again today, weather was not as good as the first day and so while it was undoubtedly more productive as things were no longer new it was not as fun. Did some more elevations today, I found it a lot easier to get going on the second day as there was no need to learn how to do it. Finished our section early and then started theodolite work (laser measuring) as well as learning how to rectify a photo so that the angle that you took it at doesn’t affect the scale.

An update on the grave I was researching. William Watson had a shop on Micklegate itself so he would have worked very close to the church that he was buried in. However no other information has come to light and it looks like anything else will be much harder to find.

Day Three
Resistivity measurement was the focus of today, out at the Heslington east development. Weather was much nicer today. I found the whole thing very interesting and can see why it is a useful evaluation tool for an excavation. Once you get going down the lines it is very easy to just get in the zone and you can have done over a kilometres worth of results before you realise.

You can also get very sunburnt

So there you are, other news in my life is that MovieSoc, the society that Will and I founded is now all official and ratified. We had our first committee meeting on Tuesday after our final meeting with YUSU, so its all good.

Off to Scotland tomorrow for a weekend in Glencoe with the Ben Lairig chaps

Field Diary - Day One Buildings Survey

Went to A church in Micklegate in the centre of York yesterday.

My group was assigned to the cemetery section of the north side of the church. We recorded the positions of 3 flat graves and two table tombs. Due to the complex and raised nature of our area we had to plot a second base line using the methods we learnt for the first one as we couldn’t use the usual methods.

I very much enjoyed the mini lecture we had at the start of the day. I had no idea what buildings archaeology was like to begin with to be honest or what it involved. I found the whole thing very engaging and fascinating and it is a real possibility for my future career path at the moment.

The main thrust of the day was to draw a scale model plan of the churches north wall and its features by plotting their distance from a baseline and the drawing a scale model. As we were doing flat graves as opposed to other groups who plotted the walls all the grass made things very difficult.

After we plotted them we had a proper look at the graves, they were very old and worn but one was for a 3 year old girl, and it was a tiny tombstone as well. Interestingly the two table tombs were both for chemists and their families so it would be interesting to see what connection they had to the church and to each other. There were no obvious links from the inside of the church so i will look them up on the census data and see were they lived. One family, the Robinson's lost two children in 3 weeks so it seems there may have been an illness in the house. Also both graves contained elderly sisters of the main internee so it looks like spinsters lived long in York

In all a very good day!