Today has been one of our hottest…and busiest days so far. The site was a hive of activity as this year’s intrepid participants continued excavating and recording the features begun earlier in the week. Trowels were digging, cameras were snapping, pens and pencils were scratching and across the site tape measures were blowing gently in the breeze. The progress today was simply brilliant! Throughout the course of the day some features were completely finished and new ones were being started. The feverish digging also produced some new finds including more pottery and struck flint. But the star find was a piece of worked animal bone found in one of the large ‘pit-like’ features, that we currently believe to be quarry hollows.
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We were also joined on site today by four of Wessex Archaeology’s geophysicists who conducted a magnetometer survey to the west and north of our excavations. They identified a series of ‘anomalies’ that appear to represent five or six more quarry hollows, a number of postholes and a large linear ditch following a similar alignment to that found in our 2005 and 2006 investigations. So it looks as if the settlement that we are currently studying continues into these areas. This suggests a possible direction for more work here in the years to come.
We’d like to say a big thank you to two long-term friends of the practical archaeology courses we have run at Down Farm. Margaret and Margaret, who visited the site today, bore with them gifts of lemon drizzle and chocolate banana cakes. Both were very gratefully received and may well be partly responsible for fuelling the pace of work on site today!