Poor weather halted excavation this morning, and the team came down to the Hub to carry out necessary work offsite. The team want to say a big thank you to Ipplepen Community Hub’s Maria and Joyce for being so welcoming and helpful, providing shelter and warm drinks for the whole team and opening up the Café especially for them. The students got to work, completing context sheets and plans and going over their work. Lowenna and Mandy also gave the students a practical lesson on how to analyse pottery. They had a productive and varied morning, and happily set off to site after lunch in the sunshine.
The productivity carried on well into the afternoon, with more exciting developments on site. Jonathan has been excavating a ditch for many days, and has uncovered an incredible find; two quern stones (for grinding cereal grains into flour to make bread). The ditch was cut beautifully and well excavated, and we have yet to reach the bottom. Well done Jon for a great find, finding quern stones on this site has a special significance as we are also finding lots of charred grains such as wheat, oats and barley. So quern stones like these provide us with the bigger picture of food production. Well done to the team for a productive day.