Oh, we packed a lot in to today, everyone is wiped out. At the end of the day yesterday I thought about the foundation some more and did some research. My initial thought was they must have dug the cellar deeper at some point, and our evidence points to using a technique called underpinning. In essence, to lower the floor of the basement, sections of the soil under the foundation were cut away at an angle to make bays, and then forms placed in and concrete poured in. Once it has cured, the next bays are excavated and filled with concrete. The process is repeated until the perimeter is complete. Since we only have part of the building exposed here, we don’t know how far it goes around the perimeter of the foundation. It may be that only part of the cellar was lowered to make room for services like the water line we can see or a furnace.
This is an example of a modern underpinning job in progress on a historic rubble foundation similar to ours. The main difference is that this house is in Norway, and the rubble walls on this structure are almost a metre thick, and the foundation comes down onto bedrock. This restorer has also put rebar into the bedrock and the sides of the completed bays to tie everything together. Source: Ian Anderson
Since we had to make some decisions with time running out, the plan was to take a sondage in the corner of the foundation to see if we could get the depth of the cellar, and maybe find some more artifacts that might tell us about the destruction event of the house.
The sondage reveals our underpinning walls come down onto a poured slab, and are more vertical than the example, but it seems clear that at some point the damp crawlspace cellar was improved by ekeing a bit more depth.Konrad used his newly aquired skills after completing the mapping data collection assignment to level and set up the totalstation over our datum except instead of too tall, which is common when a tall person sets it up, he overcompensated. I guess kneeling while taking elevations is more restful!James is standing in the cellar with the reflector touching the base of the sondage so Konrad can get a depth measurement of the cellar floor.Once the Foxes (Dee, Mischa, Konrad and Grace) had completed the sondage, they got some instructions from James for their mapping exercise and decamped to the Arch Centre.Much planning and wall profiling done today! Here Jocelyn and Sarah are recording the west wall profile of their excavation unit.Cole, Johanna, and Jay worked on planning and wall profiles of parts of OA8.
We ended the day sweaty, sunburnt, but satisfied! Tomorrow we are planning on a day indoors to catch up on artifact processing and analysis. Some of our crew haven’t yet completed a plan and a profile for their portfolios so we need to fit that in as well before backfilling on Thursday!
