There is a long standing joke on this archaeological excavation. Generally speaking, whenever we conclude that there cannot possibly be any more walls to be found on this building, we go and find another one. Now, we are pretty confident that there are no more wall features to be found running from either end of the site, but we never really planned on there being any walls jutting out at right angles from the main body of the building...we probably should have.
Yes, it's the second day of week 2, in our third season of excavations, and we start the day with some more wall features. Last week we had identified one substantial wall, or buttress as is the popular interpretation at the moment, coming off of the middle of the main building, near one of our thresholds. Now, we have a matching wall feature coming off of the walls adjoining the 'Pig Sty' end of the structure. It's early days on both features, but we may well be looking at some form of extension or support for the building, spreading out from the side of the building, no just length ways.
As if these new features were not doing enough to confuse things, beneath our 'Pig Sty' (still not renamed, even though it is clearly not a Pig Sty), we have yet another wall. We had a rubble fill stone surface which, having recorded it, was due to be removed today. Having successfully removed the fill, we came down onto, of course, another wall feature. This wall also seems to run on out of the rear of the 'Pig Sty', behind the main structure. So now we have walls coming out of the building at both the front and rear. Those faint hopes we had of wrapping this one up in two weeks are looking increasingly unlikely with this plethora of additional features to make sense of.
Finally, in between our retaining wall, and the rear wall of the building, we have come on to, of course, our fourth flagstone floor. Again, we are in the process of exposing this surface, but it looks like we have another well lain floor, which in places is covered in heavy sooting. This adds further weight to our theory that at least part of this building burnt down at some point. While the finds coming out of here remains seriously mixed up, some older material continues to come out of the ground. Today we had a sherd of pottery which can be reasonably dated to around 1550. More of this and we might just consider moving our entire time scale back by the odd century. We are not there yet though, but there are three days left for more quality dating evidence to present itself.
However, first we need to move some more spoil tips - again, they were put in really sensible locations when we started...
Yes, it's the second day of week 2, in our third season of excavations, and we start the day with some more wall features. Last week we had identified one substantial wall, or buttress as is the popular interpretation at the moment, coming off of the middle of the main building, near one of our thresholds. Now, we have a matching wall feature coming off of the walls adjoining the 'Pig Sty' end of the structure. It's early days on both features, but we may well be looking at some form of extension or support for the building, spreading out from the side of the building, no just length ways.
As if these new features were not doing enough to confuse things, beneath our 'Pig Sty' (still not renamed, even though it is clearly not a Pig Sty), we have yet another wall. We had a rubble fill stone surface which, having recorded it, was due to be removed today. Having successfully removed the fill, we came down onto, of course, another wall feature. This wall also seems to run on out of the rear of the 'Pig Sty', behind the main structure. So now we have walls coming out of the building at both the front and rear. Those faint hopes we had of wrapping this one up in two weeks are looking increasingly unlikely with this plethora of additional features to make sense of.
Finally, in between our retaining wall, and the rear wall of the building, we have come on to, of course, our fourth flagstone floor. Again, we are in the process of exposing this surface, but it looks like we have another well lain floor, which in places is covered in heavy sooting. This adds further weight to our theory that at least part of this building burnt down at some point. While the finds coming out of here remains seriously mixed up, some older material continues to come out of the ground. Today we had a sherd of pottery which can be reasonably dated to around 1550. More of this and we might just consider moving our entire time scale back by the odd century. We are not there yet though, but there are three days left for more quality dating evidence to present itself.
However, first we need to move some more spoil tips - again, they were put in really sensible locations when we started...