Today, there was more backhoeing. Specifically, we dug out a bit more of Garstang's trench, and took apart one of the walls of the open air museum. There weren't as many finds today, but there were a lot of heavy rocks, some of which I had to pick up. You see, while most of the wall was taken apart in such a way that the rocks could easily be scooped out, a fair amount of it spilled into what had been the open air museum. And, while the sculpture isn't there any more, the walls of the apse still are, so we did our best to get the fallen stones out without damaging the walls. Which meant hauling stones away from the walls, so the digger could get them without dinging the walls.
Assuming that I've figured blogger out, the picture above should be of the digger lifting stones from where they had fallen.
Unfortunately, we didn't finish up everything that we had set out to do with the digger, and it's not clear that it's going to be coming back; if it doesn't, there's a lot of dirt and rock that's going to have to be shifted by hand. My understanding is that someone else is going to be in charge of that bit of the excavation area, so I personally shouldn't have to move that stuff. But who knows what the future will bring?
After the backhoe went back to wherever it is that backhoes come from, I sat in on a bit of pottery reading; that is, an expert looked at various piles of pottery, and identified when and where they were made, based on the shape, material, and decoration of the pottery. In this case, a lot was from the fourth century BCE – the border between the Persian and Hellenistic periods, with material from before and after. It had nothing to do with the basilica, but it's an interesting period, and I learned a lot by watching the read.
Then I wrote this up, which brings us to now.
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