10th
Blog update
Hi everyone, the excavations are carrying on at a fast pace and the weather has been good to us, although we had heavy rain on Wednesday 02/09/09. This was very good for the site, it made towelling and mattocking a lot easier. Excavations in Pond Field have been going well. The large burnt area (context 21) a layer cover pits and postholes, has been cleaned back a large quantity of finds have been recovered. The large pit (Context 30) is actually not a pit (it was only part excavated in 2007; the majority of the feature ran under the bulk). It is actually a large linear ditch, which runs through the site. There are also three or four gulley’s that run from under the bulk into separate pits, although they only showed up after the rain we had on the 2/9. These will probably be left unexcavated and will be opened up in 2011. We have put two slots across the possible prehistoric ditches, and kept 100% sample for flotation, unfortunately no datable evidence has been recovered. We have also excavated the possible Bronze Age cremations; once again, 100% sample has been taken for floatation. We have put another slot through the eastern ditch. Several pieces of pot and CBM have been recovered, as well as two large pieces of iron slag, which were deposited at the very bottom of the ditch. We have also continued to excavate the pits that where half sectioned in 2007. In Court House Field, Sarah20Foster and Nick Carter continued planning the road, which Sarah Welsh had started. It was decided that the road would not be fully planned stone for stone (forty metres of road equals a lot of flint!). It was decided that edges would be recorded and at ten metres, a two-metre slot would be recorded to give a representative sample. The road will be fully photographed using a quad-tripod, and pasted together in Photoshop, also an aerial photo using a telescopic will be taken. We have spent most of this week cleaning the road for the photographs, which will be taken this coming Sunday by Lisa Fisher. We are still unable to identify the reason for the S-bend in the road. Furthermore, we have found another crossroads, which appears to head towards where the anomaly is/was, which, we presumed was the reason for the S-bend, on the opposite side of the road the crossroad heads off west out of the trench. We have excavated a slot across the possible eastern flanking ditch, and we found another possible ditch (several pieces of East Sussex ware pot was recovered). We have also found a gulley, which runs into a possible pit; once again, no datable finds have been recovered. Once the road has been cleaned, we will continue excavating the features in both Court House and Pond Field, watch this space for the last week of excavations next week, hopefully it will be an eventful week.
