Student Blog — Plans and Walls

In today’s student blog contribution, Collette discusses what we can learn from excavation and other archaeological recording techniques like drawing elevations. — Kate

Today some of us were excavating, some were doing stage 3 pits and some were drawing and planning the walls that were exposed of the house we are looking at. I was drawing the east side of wall 1 which is where the construction of the house may have started. It is important for these walls to be drawn because it shows us the construction of the house. The plans and drawings are used for comparing other plans to other sites, the way the building was constructed and finding the purpose of the building.

The walls of this structure are made from stone which indicates potential social status of the people living in the house. Back when this house was built which was in the 19th century, it was a luxury to have houses made from concrete because it was expensive while most structures were made from stone. Therefore, the walls of this house indicates that this structure was a house and that this family may have been middle class in terms of status.

It is also important to understand how these walls were built in order to understand the logic behind the workers constructing the building. Different methods may be used for different buildings as well as certain materials are more expensive than others therefore, the workers may have been trying to construct a building safely while using the resources they had.

Houses that belonged to the more wealthy may have been made from concrete which demonstrates the differences in methods and materials when building homes and other structures. We also use these plans to see if we can construct buildings today using the same methods and materials they had back then.

— Collette Martin