2009 season, day 1

Rather than heading in on Friday, I played hooky and slept until ten. But today was no day for hooky! This was the first day of the season proper, and as far as I could see, it went great.

The bit I'm excavating is the little slice of dirt between the area where we dug last season, and the area where Garstang left as an open air museum. Before we could start digging, we had to takeout the sandbags that had been left there the previous season, as well as get rid of the dirt that had escaped the control of wheelbarrows and people carrying buckets of dirt last season. And we had to clean the surface of various plants that had taken up residence over the winter. So we had work to do.

The same was true throughout the area. The JCB came in for the morning, and finished lifting the last of those rocks from Garstang's wall, and when he was gone, the people working at that end of the area turned the somewhat irregular furrow the JCB had left into a more clean-edged archaeological trench.

Basically, there looked to be about two days worth of work in the area before we could get started, and we seemed to have just about finished that.

And I was eventually able to connect to the network, and record the buckets of pottery we took out while cleaning the topsoil. Unfortunately, I kind of did that wrong, at the time. But one of the advantages of using a computer system for recording is that I can go back and fix things later. Which I'm pretty sure I did. Hopefully, tomorrow, I'll get some of the measurements that I hadn't gotten today. And, if hope may be piled onto hope, maybe next time I'll get it right the first time around.