The dig may be over, but there is no rest for the wicked. Although most of us are trying to grab a well-earned rest before commencing the post-excavation analysis of this season's fieldwork, there is still plenty to do. Today the site was visited en masse by all the delegates from the 21st Limes Congress which is currently taking place in Newcastle. This is the major international conference on Roman frontiers and has brought in scholars from across Europe and beyond; just looking at the programme I can see that there are people from Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Italy, Israel and many other places. These are the leading researchers in their fields; not surprisingly the prospect of their visit was a little intimidating! However, at the end of the day having given four site tours to a total of over 200 visitors I can say all went very well. They were interested and asked some searching questions. We also got plenty of positive feedback, which was very gratifying. There were also some extremely useful suggestions- two separate people noted that the site looked very like Barrack 13 from Housesteads- I'm looking forward to chasing this up further when the forthcoming publication of the Housesteads excavations arrives in the library.
It wasn't all just entertaining visitors today though. I had a useful chat with one of my colleagues in the Department of Archaeology today about the potential of scientific dating on the site. One of the challenges we are presented with is the difficulty of dating any activity between the end of the Roman period and the 12th/13th century. This is due to the general lack of diagnostic artefactual material in this period (apart from the limited quantities of Anglo-Saxon metalwork that is found north of the Tees). This is further complicated by the fact that any early or indeed late medieval activity on site will churn up earlier Roman layers incorporating Roman objects in later deposits. The practical upshot of this is that 5th century layers will only contain 4th century (and earlier)datable material in them. This means we have to cast around for alternative ways of dating the late activity. Obviously one potential is C14 dating - we have a number of probable 5th century features which contain enough bone for radiocarbon dating. However, we also have a number of areas of burning on some of the floor surfaces within the building which we'd like to date. However, these consist only of burning and scorching to the stones themselves; ploughing and worm action has removed any charcoal and ash from these features and they are not directly associated with other datable features. They could be sub-Roman or early medieval; equally they could be 15th century. So, how do we date them? Well one possible approach is thermoluminescence dating (TL). I won't explain the science as I don't understand myself in much detail. The key factor is that the sandstone slabs on which some of these hearths have been placed contain quartz crystals which can be used for TL dating. So, next week I'll be taking one of these slabs back to the Department for an initial assessment for its potential. If we get good results we'll look for funding to pay for a series of dates (it costs £500 a shot if any of our readers are feeling generous!). I'll report back on this further soon.
GSB Prospection, who carried out the geophysical survey for the Time Team investigation at Binchester a couple of years ago have posted a couple of interesting videos on YouTube. They are videos demonstrating the results of the Ground Penetrating Radar survey on the mausolea in 3-D. There is a video of a horizontally-rotating GPR model, a vertically-rotating GPR model and an amplitude-slice animation. Fascinating stuff!
Only a brief message to say that I've been having endless technical problems with Flickr (I can upload my images but I can't seem to make them public...), so I've created a Picasa album for this year's fieldwork at Binchester. Its mainly general site and working shots rather than detailed records shots, but there area a number of the recent photographs by Aerial Cam and also some images of our summer open days.
As promised the latest results from the geophysical survey carried out last week at Binchester. The image here shows the combined plot of all surveys carried out on the site including work previously done by Geoquest and GSB Prospection. The recent work carried out by Archaeological Services and funded by the Roman Research Trust is the large (5ha) L-shaped area to the north of the fort. 
I'm finally back from my foreign fieldwork, and have time report on a number of developments with Binchester that have occurred in my absence. Earlier on in the month we had return visit from Aerial-Cam who did some more excellent overhead photographs of this year's trench. It is possible to see most of the length of the excavated building now.
The dig may be over, but there is no rest for the wicked. Although most of us are trying to grab a well-earned rest before commencing the post-excavation analysis of this season's fieldwork, there is still plenty to do. Today the site was visited en masse by all the delegates from the 21st Limes Congress which is currently taking place in Newcastle. This is the major international conference on Roman frontiers and has brought in scholars from across Europe and beyond; just looking at the programme I can see that there are people from Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Italy, Israel and many other places. These are the leading researchers in their fields; not surprisingly the prospect of their visit was a little intimidating! However, at the end of the day having given four site tours to a total of over 200 visitors I can say all went very well. They were interested and asked some searching questions. We also got plenty of positive feedback, which was very gratifying. There were also some extremely useful suggestions- two separate people noted that the site looked very like Barrack 13 from Housesteads- I'm looking forward to chasing this up further when the forthcoming publication of the Housesteads excavations arrives in the library.
After nine weeks of excavation we have finally come to the end of the first season of excavation for the Durham-Stanford Binchester Research Project. Since June over 100 people have spent some time excavating on the site, and we owe a great deal of thanks to all the students from Durham and Stanford, as well as the members of the local community who have spent some of their summer working on site. We also owe a special thanks to the crew from Archaeological Services, particularly Matt Claydon, Janice Adams, Jamie Armstrong and Peter Carne who have overseen the organisation and running of the project this year; without them, this dig would not have been possible. There are also many others from the Dept. of Archaeology (Durham University), the Dept. of Classics (Stanford), Durham County Council, the Archaeological Association of Durham and Norhtumberland and English Heritage who have contributed in some way to the project this year.
