Day three on site dawned bright and sunny. After drying all the gloves that got wet yesterday, we prepared to meet our next group of volunteers.
We were joined on site this morning by eight children from Barton Primary School who came with their two helpers. We began again by digging holes into the site to find artefacts to tell us about how people lived in the past. All of our diggers were keen, with one needing a second tray to hold all of her finds! Exciting discoveries of the morning include a ceramic doll’s head, marbles, glass bottles and some rabbit bones.
After a short break we pressed on with the second activity of the morning, which was washing our finds. This helps us to see any patterns and decorations on the items, and tells us more about them. Some of the children left their finds to dry in the sun and continued to dig until the end of the session, and some chose to continue washing.
After lunch we had a second group of volunteers, including an aspiring archaeologist, eager to discover the past of Pan. They dug deeper than we had before on the site and found a host of interesting items including an HP sauce bottle, a butter dish that the girls pieced together like jigsaw, two more pig jaws, pieces of ceramic ornaments and a plastic pig’s trotter! One of the ornaments looks to be a woman in a bonnet with a young girl, and it goes nicely alongside the ceramic Santa Claus found this morning! We also found bulbs, buttons and a handful of colourful beads.
This afternoon’s team, after light refreshments, had a go at both washing and marking the finds with good results. Then, despite the heat, they jumped straight back in to excavation and literally had to be dragged away by their grandparents after the session had ended. It’s excellent to see so much enthusiasm on site and I’m sure we’ll be recommending them for jobs in the future!
Special mention today goes to John Martin, one of the Pan Neighbourhood Partnership Community Wardens, who fell this morning whilst cleaning litter from the playing fields and sprained his thigh. We wish him a speedy recovery and hope to see him back to full health soon.