Week 8

Even though it has been very windy this week there has been very little in the way of rain. The cooler weather has also made it a lot easier to work on site without getting too hot. Progress has been very good in all trenches and it seems that we have now recorded a lot of the more discrete archaeological features that were 'locking in' the archaeology below.
Trench 4 The mortar deposits mentioned last week have been removed, revealing lines of cobbles that might be parts of an earlier building. These have been recording separately in case they are, and not just part of the wall construction process. Underneath the mortar there are further hints of earlier occupation, but we can only investigate these once later features have been recorded and excavated.
To the west of the wall more of the deposits linked with its construction have been excavated and we may be getting towards the point where it was constructed. The wall itself has been cleaned very thoroughly and is now looking like it may have been built in two separate sections… but more about that next week. Again we have had a good range of medieval finds from the trench.
Trench 5 At the start of the week a very complicated series of plans of the cobbles and other deposits were drawn; once we had completed this we began to excavate. In the south-west corner of the trench the structure has turned out to be a large footing, perhaps for a big post or similar. This may link with the other structures on the site, though we may only find out in the post-excavation process. Elsewhere in the trench we have been trying to unravel a sequence of dumps and cobbles that acted as the foundation for the roads (see previous weeks' diaries for their descriptions).
This week there has been a huge volume of finds from the trench, with tile and animal bone being the most common.
Trench 6 There has been a big change in the trench this week as the wall footing has been removed. It proved to be very easy to take to bits as the mortar that held it together was very soft. The large size of some of the pieces of reused stone and how to move them was the only difficult part of the process. The specialist in architectural stonework will have a look at them next week to assess if any of them are really important, but we can already see part of an arch and a window.
At the moment the trainees are cleaning up the bottom of the construction cut and it looks like the cobble features mentioned last week may in fact be earlier than the wall, so more recording to do. We have a lot of finds this week with medieval pottery, animal bone and brick and tile being the most common.
Trench 7 We have finally isolated the construction point for the wall footings in this trench. Even though the construction cut was obviously cutting through earlier medieval deposits to the north, the southern side was confusing and had been subjected to later disturbance. Over the past week we have removed deposits on the southern side, enabling us to reach when the wall was actually built. More cobbles are starting to show up within this cut and we may have earlier structures with a cobble footing (as in Trench 6). With some more recording we will be able to see what is going on beneath the wall and hopefully get a better idea of what went on with the earlier building. Lots of brick and tile have been excavated this week, but the most interesting find was a piece of what appears to be worked antler… Hopefully our finds specialists will be able to work out what it was for.
As you can see the trenches are changing day by day, with all sorts of fascinating archaeology being revealed. The site is proving to be even more interesting than we initially thought and we have only got four weeks left to answer our questions.