AN OCCASIONAL PROGRESS REPORT
of the 2010 Excavation
by Jeremy Cooper

The views expressed are Jeremy's own and the information is his own understanding - he has been known to get things wrong!

No blog today.

Hot again today and a bit humid too. Cooling, brisk, breeze.

In the AB the hunt is on for the bottom of the boundary ditch (the one with a bank) in the trench running along the hedgerow. They are already 2ft (60cms) lower than on Friday, and no bottom in sight yet.

Before I arrived they'd unearthed a horses skull here.

Meanwhile others in AB had spent a half day exploring the smaller ditches revealed by at soil marks towards the end of last week.

The soil is so hard and dry here that it really is no fun at all! And they haven't reached the bottom here either!

Over in BH2 the mosaic is being painstakingly cleaned...



... mainly with toothbrushes, as Laura here demonstrates!



It's becoming clear that there are at least two different colours of tessera...



... see the bluish ones? When the cleaning is completed we'll take an overhead shot (please Nick) and play with the colours in PhotoShop to see if any pattern emerges - unlikely, but there's no conclusion till the final whistle blows, Brian.

Speaking of colours, BH2 yielded (sorry if this sounds like a football commentary) a nice piece of pot.



Steve was put in to play today to explore the corner of the East wall where it meets the North wall of Room 5.



No goals scored here yet.

Fred carried on clarifying the drains. (PLEASE see Wednesday and Thursday's blogs below for more info from Fred, and a bit of a mystery!). Here's a small section of the wood lining the drain along the West wall of BH2...

Here's where it is...

It disappears northwards under the cap stones on which I am standing.

Here, to end, is a bit of landscape...



... the staple of the local economy grazes peacefully in the foreground (actually it stares gormlessly at the camera like a bunch of celebrities), the students' campsite is in the middle distance, and in the background on the right is the TV mast on Borough Hill with its iron age and roman settlements. Continuity and change.

Day 13 of 20: Wednesday 30 July

Hi Jeremy. A point of clarification re the 'wood lined drain'. It is
actually a wood pipe, i.e. a bulk of wood with a hole drilled through it.
So far we have one length of 3.8m and a second length of at least 1.5m
(we haven't found the other end yet). The received wisdom is that it is a
water supply pipe not a drain. At present we are not quite sure what to
do with it. It has only survived by being in water-logged ground, drying
out would be fatal, and lifting an object that long and fragile will not
be easy.

Cheers Fred

"Point of clarification" indeed - I got it wrong! Thanks for straightening me out, Fred.

Day 15 of 20: Friday 2 July

End of another week.

A few finds to start with...

A very nice, but again very small, copper-alloy ring, from AB. Found by metal-detectorist Tony.



A fibula from AB - and this one was excavated (phew) - by Nabeel (apologies if I've got the wrong digger).



Jane has been busy at her accustomed jigsaw job - here's what she has made of the pot sherds found in AB under that mass of bone.

Site tour

The Friday site tour revealed all to the extent that all was revealable. Here' an over view of the main end of BH2. Click on it for a much larger version with some annotations refering to what follows.



I've given up numbering the rooms, because the convention seems to be evolving and I can't keep up. But I think the total now stands at 7 including the main praefurnium.

The foundations we knew were there last Friday around the mosaic room are now very clear to see...



and there is a chance of a further room to the east of the mosic room (on the right edge of the photo).

Also, there is something going on to the south of the mosaic room and hypocaust room where there is a pebbled surface.

There is no wall between the hypocaust room and the mosaic room, while the hypocaust room's floor must have been at least 18 inches higher than the mosaic. Puzzling this. The layout of the rooms in terms of bath house functionality is still not clear.

In the wall to the south of the mosaic room, near the south-east corner...


The drain is pebbly bit in the foreground with a context tag in it. Looking northish.

... is a drain which appears to lead away northwardsish, and may account for the mosaic being a bit disarrayed along its eastern edge.

To the north of the mosaic is a pebbled strip running parallel to the north wall of the mosaic room...


Looking southeast, mosaic under black plastic top right corner

This will be coming out first thing next week to see what is underneath.

Just round the corner from the pebble strip is a drain which may connect westwards to Fred's drain.


Looking southwestwardish

Meanwhile, the wood in Fred's drain (indeed it is, for the moment, a drain again) has been identified as a roof beam (see Thursday's blog email from Fred) - it has all the right jointing features for a roof beam. It did not come from the roof of BH2 but from somewhere else: Tony claims it's from the AB building, but he would, wouldn't he? Why there is a roof beam lying at foundation level is not clear (!): it may be to do with lining the drain, or with demarcating the position of the wall during building.


The roof beam is under the black plastic - long eh?

Steve emphasised how very unusual it is to find wood of this kind in such a position - WF does it again! The wood will be removed later this year when there is time to give it the very careful attention is deserves.

Margaret's team were up the north end of BH2, weeding around the praefurnium and doing a bit more epxloring there.



Dave showed us a somewhat puzzling sandwich of large flat stones and opus signinum along the line of the long drain dug diagonally right across BH2 (the one with our pipe in it).


Looking westwards

The alignment of this sandwich suggests that it supported a later (?) wall which cut west-east across that room.

Next, Tony introduced us to the story-waiting-to-break which I mentioned in last Fridays blog (see the photo of the bag of iron particles).


Looking westwards, the re-buried BH1 is behing Tony

Between me and Tony in this photo is an area at the north end of the lower slope which is riddled with iron, with a very sharp, straight boundary between it and the iron-free surroundings. Tony has studied the iron through a microscope. The particles are not the globules produced by smelting, but the rough-shaped bits produced by hammering iron into shape (hammer scale), or produced by crushing during the iron-producing proces. Anway, it looks likely (to say the least) that there was iron working of some kind going on here. Once Tony's team has finished in AB it will move over here to see what it can find.

Over in AB, the estate boundary ditch (the one with a bank) has been dug out to the natural.


Looking westwardsish

Big isn't it? And very V-shaped. Tony thanked all of his team - everyone did their stint at excavating this huge hole.

The boundary ditch continues the other side of the caravan...


Looking northwards

...and this will be explored more next week.

Meanwhile those soil marks mentioned last Friday have been excavated...


Looking southwards

... to produce a very nice field boundary ditch which prepdates the more substantial estate boundary ditch and bank (which runs just outside the left of frame).

One side of this ditch is well defined, while the other is a bit eslusive.


Looking northwards. The estate boundary ditch is seen in the bottom right hand corner

It's clear that many large stones have been removed from the ditch at some stage (not by us!). There is also evidence of a couple of pits on the inside of the corner, just in front of Tony in the photo above.

Tony emphasised that while AB had produced no buildings per se, it had produced some very fine finds (see above), and confirmed and clarified considerably what was found out when AB was excavated way back at the beginning of the Whitehall odyssey.

Just one more week to go! Fingers crossed for good weather.
____________________________________________________
PS

Dear Folk

Hello to all my old mates - Steve, Beryl, Sandy, Malcolm, and Fred.

Looks like I will miss the whole dig this year. I had hoped to get up for a couple of days digging, but my wife has been in hospital with heart problems. Maybe I'll sneak up one evening before you finish to check out the progress.

Thanks Jeremy. Really enjoying the blog, very helpful to us virtual diggers moving our cybertrowels ever so carefully.

Particularly impressed with the Chinook, presumably utilised by the Legions for moving across bandit-infested country quickly :)

Best regards,

Neil Turner

The Chinook photo was from last year's blog, left on the Week 4 page as a place holder. Apparently, a helicopter landed this year not very far from WF, during week 1 I think. Nobody noticed it take off again, so it might still be there. Russian spies? Or a certain footballo manager going into retreat?