Konrad Morawski
The excavation of OA11 ended up being much more complex than I once thought. On the first day when James and Kate told the foxes that we were going to be digging up a potential basement and all we could see was a couple rocks and a small void, I was expecting a small crawlspace and maybe a couple stones indicating a wall. Spoiler, I was wrong.
After expanding our original 2x3m grid to a 3x3m grid and removing the top soil we slowly started to uncover a wall. We were surprised to see how much of the wall was still standing and we were able to start visualizing how our wall would connect to the other contexts around us.
Once we had planned and identified all the different contexts in our grid we decided it would be best to dig down the interior context (107) to get a better idea of what room this may have been and what kind of artifacts we would find in it. After a couple more days of excavation we identified context 107 as a fill/destruction deposit from when Trent demolished the house in the 1960s. We were finding glass, ceramics and A LOT of rusty nails.
Nearing the end of the excavation, we found a concrete footing beneath the stone wall that we had previously excavated. This brought up a lot of questions, but thanks to Kate, we were able to identify it as a process called underpinning, which was done to strengthen the stone wall when they dug down to deepen the basement. We decided to dig a 1x1m sondage to try and see how deep the floor was (rather than take down 107 altogether), and thankfully, we were able to find it before we started backfilling.
I think one of the best parts about the field school was seeing in real time how much I improved in terms of confidence in excavating and my ability to identify artifacts. If I look back on the first day versus the last one I can see a huge difference. Another cool part was seeing all of the content that I learned in class start to appear in real life. For example, I was able to identify a lot of bones using what I learned from Archaeozoology, which I didn’t think I was going to be able to do, but I was pleasantly surprised.
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