2009 season, week 2 in review.

This morning was a working day, but not one spent in the field -- instead, we spent the day in the pottery compound, organizing some of the material gathered in earlier season, for a new study project. So not too much to report on that front.

But another week is gone, so here's another wobbly bit of video for you. This is actually my third attempt at shooting this; I'll leave the quality of the previous tries to your imagination.

So, as far as a review goes, we basically finished everything that I had set out to finish this week. If we hadn't found that stone feature, we would have gone deeper, but it would be foolish to be upset at archaeology interfering with my ability to move dirt -- if that was the priority, we could have used a bulldozer.

Next week, hopefully, we'll dig a bit more in that robber trench, starting with the ash pit, knock a few more courses off of Garstang's wall, and head on down into a pottery rich fill that we've seen all across the site.


As with last week, I've got a few pictures from the other squares open in our area:
We'll start with the square next to mine. I don't seem to have a good picture of it, but they seem to be coming down on that same big wall that I'm coming down on. I think that over the next two weeks, the relationship between that wall and the other features we see in the square is going to become clearer -- there's certainly a lot going on, in different periods, and it does seem like exposing the architecture in that area is going to help clarify when different features were built, and what their relationship to each other is.

in the northern square, the big plaster lined pit from last week has been taken out, through the vigorous application of pickaxes. It seems to go a bit deeper than we had expected, so we're left with a little rectangle of plaster where it stood.

In addition to going down in the open areas of the square, they also dug a remarkably deep probe, to see if they could find a floor related to the basilica, or possibly one of the walls. They didn't find either of those, but a close look at the sides of the probe should give useful information about the levels that they'll be going through, as they dig down.

And that's all for week 2. Or at least, that's all I can think of for now.