I'm Matt and I'm here to share what Super Seven has been up to in squares C5 & B5 in the TARDIS.
While we've been largely absent from this blog so far, our quadrant brothers and sisters from The Sifters haven't been. Make sure you check out their latest entry, which is all fancy with moving pictures and sounds. While I'll be mentioning some of their activities in this blog, you'll have to make do with just words from me.
First up I'll tell you about our first week in the TARDIS
2/9/10: Our first meeting
The first meeting of the Super Seven and squares B5 & C5 was fleeting but enjoyable. Extremely fleeting in the case of C5, as we had decided in our research plan to only excavate B5.
Katherine, Lynne and myself dove into the squares, cleaning away a year of neglect to make them look very smart and clean, with B5 emerging smooth, pale and weed-free.
4/9/10: the First Saturday
Super Seven's first weekend in the TARDIS was wet and windy, making our squares a muddy mess of clay and gravel just days after our attempts to tidy them up.
After we performed some cosmetic surgery, or clean up as everyone else called it, on the squares, soaking up all the mud with a sponge and squaring it up, the excavation began, with Sureyya the first to take the reins.
While the clean up was being done, Phil was busy takes levels, certainly his speciality within the Super Sevens group. It became obvious during the day that my specialty was providing sugar filled treats such as snakes and sultanas, and Stephanie's was eating them (despite her protests that she shouldn't have anymore).
Due to the conditions and the understandable apprehension of a new dig, excavation was slow to begin with, but soon there were full buckets from the clean up. This level was named Context 307, and despite careful sieveing we only found a few small pieces of concrete.
We had originally attempted to simply shake sieve the spoil, but very quickly, Stephanie, Katherine and myself finally deciding upon using a water bottle in a makeshift wet sieving system. This worked significantly better, as well as being significantly messier, which made it even more fun.
Back in B5, we had moved through the top context 307, and had discovered two new contexts: the northern, gravelly context 309 and the southern, clay ridden context 308. While we only removed a small amount of 308 (still finding three concrete fragments) we began to remove context 309 on Saturday, finding some charcoal, wooden fragments and more fragments of concrete.
Super Sevens strategy of sieving everything we took out of B5 saw us find 10 small fragments of concrete, the largest which was 7 grams, as well as some charcoal and wooden fragments. We were unsure at the time if this was diagnostically relevant.
The Sifters
Over in A5 & A4, The Sifters had also decided to concentrate on one square (A4).
Using a trowel, The Sifters spent there opening week mostly focused on the surface scatters of slate and glass in Context 011 found along the northern and north eastern boundaries of A4. Also found was a nail and two unidentified round metal objects. Just like Super Sevens, they decided to sieve all spoil. The Sifters recorded the artifacts they recovered in their log book and also in photos.
This rounds up Week One in the TARDIS for The Sifters and Super Seven. I'd like to thank Lynne, Phil, Stephanie, Katherine and Sureyya from Super Seven for helping in Super Seven's notes, and thank Caroline for her notes on The Sifters activities.
Hope you enjoyed it and I'll be posting Week Two soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment