2009 season, days 28 and 29

I spent today in the pottery compound, catching up on reading, but there were certainly people out in the field today.

As can be seen by this pair of pictures. The first shows the square as we left it yesterday, and the next one as the people working there left it at the end of the day. And you can certainly see the difference -- for one thing, someone seems to have left a trowel there today.

Also, they left it clean, whereas under my direction, it was left a bit messy. Now, as there is a great deal of dirt still left in the picture I'm calling clean, you might not see what I'm talking about. But take a closer look, particularly at the area beyond the bottom step of that big byzantine wall.

You'll probably have to click through to see it, but just by sweeping away the loose dirt, they found another course of stones, almost connecting that wall to the section standing in what had been Garstang's open air museum. Which had been something that I wanted to look for, but which I hadn't had the time for on Monday -- I had to push pretty hard to get the last bits I wanted excavated finished by the end of the day, as it was our last day of excavation.

So, all in all, I'm pretty happy with what was done; there will probably have to be a final sweep before the pictures for the end of the season, but other than that, field work is more or less finished in 47.53. Which isn't to say that work is done -- we've got a few more crates of pottery to wash and read, and then there's all sorts of documentation that needs to be documented.

But not tonight!