Secondary school visit: Sands School, Ashburton.
Today we discovered charred grains! This was especially exciting as we enjoyed a school visit from Sands School, who made Roman style bread at a workshop just before this year’s fieldwork commenced. The Sands pupils joined the team for the afternoon and helped with various fieldwork activities including excavation, sieving and finds washing. Two of the students visited us last year and described various excavation processes to the others; our potential archaeologists are keen to learn more and would like to return as volunteers when they are older. Thank you to all students and staff for today’s help- we hope to see you again in the future!
The excavation
Today the team enjoyed better weather and were able to continue planning and excavating features in the sun. Eli’s trench yielded more large pottery finds. The team have also started wet sieving. This is a process which ensures that all soil is thoroughly checked for small fragments such as charcoal, bone, seeds and pottery. The wet sieving team have discovered charred grains, which us great news as we will be able to further analyse these in the lab (see previous ‘cereals’ and ‘breadmaking’ posts). Josh, who discovered the tiny grains whilst wet sieving was really pleased to have spotted them.
The Hub
The Hub had a busy day, with visits from far and wide. We have almost reached our 200th visitor, so thank you to today’s interested visitors, and we look forward to meeting the 200th visitor tomorrow! At the end of the day we had a fun visit from Jo, Charlotte and Daniel, who came in to see the displays and activities. They added their own coin designs to our Roman coin inspired display. Come and design your own coin at the Hub!