janewilliams20

It would be nice to have a gap between the colds, rather than having them overlap. I thought I was coming to the end of the last one, but now I'm sneezing too much (interesting, in the fast lane of the A1) and the sinuses are raw again.
Going to the Norton Community Archaeology Group talk last night probably didn't help - a fascinating overvew of the results from the dig I helped with last summer, but held in a drafty building with no heating.  It seems that what we were digging up is the previously unknown link between formative henges and classic henges. (Yes, thanks to the speaker's enthusiasm, I did get excited about this.) When you look at what happened, in what order, you can see a formative henge (circular) being converted to a classic henge (oval). It got used for lots of plate-smashing parties with high quantities of meat being eaten,  and later, just as henges were becoming fashionable, the whole thing stopped. A child cremation burial was placed at the entrance, and it was effectively abandoned from the very early Bronze Age onwards, though still visible when the annoying modern irrelevance was built around it - a Roman farmstead, and a Roman industrial iron production site :)

(I should perhaps add for the benefit of American readers that even by British standards, calling Roman remains "modern" is not normal, unless one is a professional archaeologist specialising in the Neolithic, and even then, it's said ironically.)


 

Back at the Norton dig again, and still trying to define the edges of a ditch - chalk walls, soil infill. Except for where the infill also seems to be chalk, because the wall slumped. This time it was "just" cleaning rather than major soil removal, or at least this was the plan. So, an hour of scraping, break time (half an hour to walk to the loo at Bickerdykes and back - no, they can't have a porta-loo, anything left on site overnight gets vandalised), another hour of scraping. Trouble is, my wrist isn't really strong enough for this very hard, dry soil, and because I'm sitting on a stool, not kneeling, I can't properly apply what strength I've got. I'm not convinced I achieved anything very useful. No, I can't kneel, even with a kneeler. Well, I can, but most of my concentration is on getting the pressure back off the lymphodaemic shins, and not screaming, and this isn't helpful.
Keith has a panorama of the site, and there I am in the front right group, back to you, wearing yellow.



I'd only planned on working the morning anyway, and a good job, I was tired enough by the end of that that getting up a one-foot step was hard work. So, afternoon, I was on to paper-work. Registering all the finds that were coming in, each in their own neatly-labelled plastic bag. Most were the exciting "flint", "bone", "snail shell", "CBM" (ceramic building material i.e. brick or tile), but one, registered out of order because of the excitement, was a tiny Celtic coin!
Keith's blog for the day tells the detail

But then the storm clouds started heading our way, and since paperwork is one of the few things on site that will dissolve in rain, we packed up - everything in bags, bags in boxes, boxes under tarps, now weigh the tarps down. I'd already got my waterproof on - well, my lightweight animal-print shower-proof. This is going to be a light summer shower, right? Wrong... it got heavy. The thunder started. It got really heavy - right, pack up all tools. Not a lot I could do to help with that - a bit of light folding and packing, but I was well beyond heavy lifting by now.
Important and non-waterproof things stayed under tarps for as long as they could.


The rain then turned to hail, and I realised that my shower-proof was not even close to being proof against this. Nor was it as good as I'd hoped at being wind-proof, or capable of keeping me warm. My back, already unhappy, decided to lock up. Time to beat a retreat, stopping under a tree to get my bag into a carrier bag, since canvas wasn't up to this, either. It's about 15 min walk to the car, partially across fields, with less butterflies on view than yesterday for some reason, and as I suspected then and confirmed when I got home, the "waterproof" had done such a good job that every item of clothing, protected by it or not, was wet enough to need wringing out.

Warm dry dressing gown, hot soup, and the return of Dave, were all good things, but in the absence of immediate hot water and given how tired I was, I decided that a short nap in a Warm Happy Place would be a good idea. Short nap... right. Three hours later, Dave woke me with a kiss.