Week 11 (23 - 29 August)

A dry week at last! Everything, from moving around site, was so much less trying, and so an even better time was had by all. It seems the holiday period in the USA is over, as our American representation has ended; however the British trainees were joined by two Danes. The site remained closed to visitors for two days while the site recovered, but after much effort from the guides we were able to re-open the site and almost 1,400 people came through the doors, bringing the total to nearly 17,000.

A Roman glass bead

Trench 3

Another series of sloping rampart deposits, mostly ash and charcoal, have been encountered. There is still no sign of the natural ground surface, and the trench is getting deeper every day. This is not what was expected!

Trench 4

A fragment of beautiful Roman vessel glass

The mortar filled cut identified last week has proved to be very deep. This feature is thought to be the result of robbing of the walls of the medieval infirmary; hopefully, we will find the intact foundation beneath.

Trench 5

Excavation of the layers of wall plaster continued, producing further examples of painted decoration. A near complete mortarium bowl was found. Re-excavation of the parallel modern trenches showed that they were dug to either side of a concrete slab - the foundations for the south wall of the Multangular Tower have been found at last! Apparently the (probably 1920s) excavators had followed the wall along its inner and outer faces. The medieval column base foundation was found to rest partly on the edge of this Roman foundation - another case of the medieval builders utilising the Roman structures where it suited them.

Wall plaster from with incised lines, presumably to allow another layer of plaster to be applied	The mortarium being excavated

Trench 6

The timber piles in Trench 6, exposed beneath the foundations of the Multangular Tower

The highlight here was the extraction of three timber piles from beneath the wall of the Multangular Tower, a reward for the tremendous efforts put in to recover these timbers in a deep and very wet trench. Our joy was somewhat tempered when the YAT wood specialist, Steve Allen, identified the timbers as alder. Alder does not produce a consistent growth pattern every year, and so is useless for tree-ring dating. Nevertheless, the timbers display interesting evidence of Roman carpentry techniques, which will no doubt be the subject of a web diary update in the months to come.

Part of one pile is retrieved	Steve Allen examines one of the piles in the lab

Excavating thick modern deposits at the east end of Trench 6

In the eastern part of the trench the early 20th century gravel surface already found in the western part was removed. However the layers below are modern in date and very thick, indicating the 1920s excavations were quite extensive.