Week 7, 18–24 August

Smashing the record for weekly visitor numbers is becoming a recurring habit here at St. Leonard's; an incredible 2200 vistors touring the excavations this week. Total visitor numbers for this season have now passed the 12,600 mark. Work continued with training and excavating within all of the trenches, with most trainees coming from the UK, but with one from Switzerland. Read on for exciting new developments and dilemmas.

Trench 1

Cleaning the top of rampart deposits

Excavation continued within the Roman interval tower SW6. Although this trench had largely reached its safe depth limit, permission was given by English Heritage to excavate a small slot in the middle of the trench through the deposits within the tower, to search for deposits and features associated with its occupation. This has revealed that the main south-east wall in this part of the interval tower had been robbed of facing stones, and the concrete beam on which it was constructed chipped away; this robbing had also removed any occupation deposits within the tower. The deposits that backfilled this robbing activity were very different from the dumps excavated in Week 6. They consisted of sand and burnt clay and tile suggesting that the material derived, at least in part, from the demolition and clearance of a hearth structure or furnace close by. Only Roman pottery including Samian and rusticated wares were recovered this week. Could this suggest that the wall was robbed in the Roman period?

Trench 3

Excavation in trench 3

Having removed all of the green dumps on the eastern side of the trench, we began tackling a series of homogenous dumps this week These appear to mimic the slope of the Roman rampart that we imagine survives at a lower level. Could this material have derived from the levelling of part of the Roman rampart in the 11th or 12th century? Some medieval material was recovered, but the majority of the finds consisted of Roman material including painted plaster, pottery and glass. A shell bead and a very well preserved plated iron nail were also recovered.

Trench 4 from the undercroft

Trench 4

As work at the southern end of the site has concentrated within trench 1 this week, little progress was made in trench 4. Minor inroads were made into excavating out the backfills of the Time Team trench (1999) and trench 2 (2001) with fragments of tile, pottery and glass being recovered. Watch this space!

Trench 5

Cleaning up demolition deposits in the air-raid shelter.

This week the team has focussed on revealing the position, orientation and detail of a Victorian gravel path that sweeps across the excavation area in a north to south direction; the continuation of this path was excavated in Trench 3 in 2001. This would have been one of the principal routes through this part of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society's Garden of Antiquities situated here in the late 19th and early 20th century. The path consists of a complex sequence of lensed gravel, clinker and mortar deposits edged during its later use by large limestone blocks. More of the latest path survived than originally thought, though it had been damaged to the west during the construction and demolition of the World War 2 air-raid shelter and subsequent landscaping. A great selection of artefacts recovered from the landscaping deposit that sealed the path dated from the prehistoric period (flint scraper/tool) to the relatively modern (Victorian hair clip and a modern pen-knife).

Planning the Victorian path

	Fragment of Samian pottery recovered from trench 3 showing a running lion.
	Fragment of Roman mortaria pottery from trench 5. The bowl which this would have been a part of was used to grind up herbs and spices.