Day 3 was ultimately a day of partial conclusions. Having set some targets earlier in the week, we were well placed to finish certain things off. Most notably at the bread oven end of the building, where we have now finally made some sense of how this structure connects with the rest of the building. We had long suspected that there would need to be some sort of step up into the room built around the oven/furnace, but until today we had not had the opportunity to dismantle the infill wall which had seemingly been constructed to block off this area. With all of the intriguing glass ware removed from yesterday, it was possible to progress, and sure enough, we have now identified a wonderfully clear and very well preserved step, which links the small room with the main building. There is still some room for speculation as to what this room was actually used for - we had three working theories for it by the afternoon session, but at the very least we have now got an excellent and clear cut feature - you can't really argue with a step being a step.
Elsewhere on the site, four areas are now being investigated. Three of these have been continued from day 2, with particular attention falling on the floor surfaces in the 'Pig Sty' structure. Having uncovered a stunning floor surface yesterday, work continued to try and make sense of how that floor relates to the overlying walls. Probably the most interesting feature to come out of here today was what appears to be a drainage feature. This would be unique for this site, and an interesting development. Further work is needed here, which may require additional removal of standing features, but understanding an internal drainage system might just make that worthwhile.
More floor surfaces are coming out near to the 'Pig Sty' though, but oddly at a significantly different height. There is not much more to be said on this at this point in time, other than we have well constructed floor surfaces which appear to overlap one another. It would suggest multiple phases of use in this part of the building, but not much more at this stage. We are also close to understanding one of our threshold features to the rear of the structure. A tremendous amount of rubble has been moved by three of our team over the last three days, and we are hopefully in a position, come day 4, to really get into one of our entrances, and get a clearer images as to how this part of the site worked.
Just when the site is beginning to make sense though, another spanner is thrown into the works. On the other side of the building, back where we started these excavations over a year ago, we have uncovered, yet another, wall feature. Running off at right angles from the main building, it awaits to be seen how this feature will develop, but it would appear that the building that can't stop generating new walls, has delivered us with one more. Again, not much to be said in terms of conclusions at this point in time, but certainly we have another question to tackle in the morning...fortunately, we have just had an emailed confirmation of two additional excavators coming along to join us in the morning, so our team should be back up to a near full compliment!
(Tomorrow is the Day of Archaeology, so we will have a shorter update here, to go with our blog post for this wonderful annual celebration of everything that is happening in the world of archaeology.)