We are into the last week of field school, which means today is the last planned day of excavation. We also have a ton of recording to do in the other parts of the site where excavation has been completed.
Tony and David of the Bears began the day by doing another plan of the contexts exposed in their excavation unit.They were soon joined by other Bears, who were working on drawing the exposed stone walls.Since the Bear’s unit was full of planners, Makayla jumped in to draw the wall profile of the Ladybug’s unit. This involves setting a level line above the ground surface, and using it as a reference point to draw the exposed face of the excavation area and any different soils, rocks, inclusions etc. are present.The Snakes still had a bit of excavation left to do, so they worked on levelling the floor of their unit and tidying the walls in preparation for, you guessed it, planning and profiling.The Ladybugs have moved to their new unit, which we predicted is either a well or a cesspit. It’s looking more and more like it is a cesspit, so we won’t be doing too much else at this point. But first they need to clear back the overlying soil that has accumulated since the house was destroyed.The Foxes made it their goal today to excavate as much of the cellar fill as possible, including heaving out large slabs of concrete from the destruction event.More slabs coming out!The Ladybugs went to the Arch Centre to help with artifact processing, so Lucas stepped in to do the final clean up of their unit for them.As is extremely common in archaeology, there is usually some major development that inconveniently happens RIGHT before excavations need to end. Today was that day for this field school. The Foxes worked extremely hard in moving a ton of fill and slabs and right at the end of the day we discovered a concrete sill under the field stones of the foundation, and no sign of a floor. This will require a ponder overnight so we can tackle it tomorrow.
It was a very busy, productive day on site. Tomorrow we need to sort out what is happening in the Foxes unit, and get more recording done!
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