Friday 27 June 2014

Binchester 2014: Day fifteen

Final day of the first stage of this year’s project – it was the last time our first year undergraduate archaeology students joined us. Across both sites there was lots of recording- planning, section and elevation drawing and filling in of context sheets.

Despite all this paperwork, digging continued. In Trench 1, the corner tower is looking really good now- they’ve come down onto the floor level in places and have picked up the foundation slabs on which it seems to have been constructed. In the barracks, we’ve resumed unpicking the barrack block again. Half of our lovely cobbled stable area has come  up and we’ve dropped down onto a metalled surface which appears to underlie the adjacent dividing wall. We’ve also excavated a large pair of postholes which lie more or less in the middle of the room (and roughly aligned on what might be some interior post-pads).

Over in bath-house, progress slowed down in the main bath-house room as we focused on recording – drawing elevations and the sections of the baulk. In the corridor area, the sections were also being drawn. In the newly exposed area by the corridor, it looks like our putative east-west corridor has turned back into an alcove symmetrical with its partner. This is what we originally expected, although it is clear that the northern wall continued eastwards.

In the area to the south of the bath-house the clay layer continues to come out- we are going to have to take out the walls of the structure to get back into sequence though. Excitingly, in the area just to the west of the structure, just at the end of the day, we found a couple of what appear to be mold fragments for making copper alloy objects  - possibly studs or maybe a brooch fragment ( they need a good clean).


Lots to look forward to on Monday when our US group join us!










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