In many respects, it was business as usual for the team, with our three target areas from the end of last week, continuing to be our major priorities. The most time consuming of these is the extending feature to the rear of the building. Last week we identified what we are confident is a retaining wall, behind our main structure. The space in between this wall and the building is, however, almost totally full with stone rubble. As has been the theme of recent days on this dig, the focus has been on intense stone removal. By the end of the day, we had had five different people working on this, each of whom are no doubt complaining about the state of their spines.
For all the heavy lifting though, this mess of stone collapse is proving rewarding. While we have managed to identify partial remains of the retaining wall, it is the artefacts coming out of it which have been more interesting. This fill has been the most artefact rich part of the site, and it continued to reward us today. While we need to make sure, it looks like we have our first sherd of late medieval pottery, a cracking green glaze sherd. It's isolated, and in a highly disturbed context, but it's a great find for our predominantly 17th century building.
In addition, readers of this blog may well remember the discovery of a mill stone in one of internal wall surfaces. Well, today we found what is almost certainly the other half. While the second part of the mill stone is currently sealed in a trench section, it is likely that we will look to remove this tomorrow, and hopefully confirm that we do indeed have a complete mill stone.
Elsewhere, our former Pig Sty building, which must be renamed one of these days, because it clearly had nothing to do with pigs, continues to develop. We now have an excellently preserved flagstone floor, with steps leading out of the rear of the building. On the other side of the main building, near one of our other thresholds, more building work has been uncovered, with a significant and substantial exterior wall being exposed to its full width. This one in particular is catching attention, because so far it does not really seem to go anywhere, while being far larger than any interior walls. Is this a supporting wall, or something more complex?
Inside the main building, the team did some sterling work finishing off excavation of two small internal rooms, giving us a clear picture on the level of the floor surfaces, and revealing the detail of the wall coursing inside these rooms. Thanks guys, your task may not have been inspiring, but it was a really important for our understanding of this corner of the site!
So on to day 6, where more mass stone removal will be the main order of business.