Week 5

This week we were joined by students from the United States, Sweden, France, Belgium and from elsewhere in Britain. The steady flow of visitors to the site, both foreign tourists and local people, increased as summer holidays got underway. This was another damp week, but merely prompted the acquisition of another shelter to cover Trench 4, and work continued.

Excavating a turf stack in Trench 3

Over the weekend we hosted an event as part of National Archaeology Day. Re-enactors from the local group Comitatus and the East Yorkshire section of the World War Two Living History Group formed a 'history street' representing the major episodes in the site's history, from the Roman conquest to World War 2. Russell Marwood of YAT devised a children's quiz, and ran a war-gaming exhibit. The event was free, and attracted over 2,000 visitors, bringing the total number of visitors to 7,000.

Trench 3

Trainees were busy this week trowelling through the layers of a large pit. This may originally have been a cess pit cut into the rampart layers but this will not be clear until environmental work is carried out on the soil samples taken from the pit. Work otherwise has concentrated on examining the layers which make up the Roman rampart; surprisingly, some of these deposits appear to be layers of turf.

Trench 4

Work continued in this trench to expose the steps down to the WW 2 air raid shelter. Deposits encountered during this work found fragments of glazed floor tile. Although these were found residually (i.e mixed in with later material), they are of great interest as if they are medieval in date they might help to reconstruct the appearance of the hospital floors.

Roman wall plaster under careful excavation in Trench 5

Trench 5

In Trench 5 work continued examining the deposits associated with the robbed Roman wall of the rear chamber of the Multangular Tower. This had previously been examined by Miller in the 1920s in an effort to understand the extent of the hospital. More Roman plaster, some of it painted with linear coloured scheme, continued to be recovered from these layers and it seems likely that it came from this now robbed out wall. The pieces of painted plaster which had been lifted previously are now undergoing conservation treatment to stabilise it prior to research.

National Archaeology Day: a member of staff tries out the Roman crossbow