A memorable feature of this year’s session for me will be the consistency of the weather. Not that it’s been the same all the time, indeed exactly the opposite: sun, cloud, shower, sun, cloud, shower, rinse and repeat. And windy, to boot. So, of course this meant that the attempt to fly “Steve” (the Trust’s drone) first thing this morning had to be aborted half way through, when yet another drizzly shower swept across the site.
Our trio of former rock stars (Mike was away for the morning, on pot-washing duty) pushed on with our new zone, into the lower blue area in the image in yesterday’s post. It was my turn to chunk and I quickly hit an unusually hard, but non-stony, surface at the southern edge of our area. Troweling revealed more of it, a clearly a flat layer of clay, baked hard in extreme heat. Further troweling around it also revealed an expanse of a very hard, yellowish baked clay nearby and a zone of white/black speckled ash – a liter of which was collected for subsequent chemical analysis. This combination can only mean another oven, this time belonging (I believe) to the period IV fort, just a few years before Hadrian’s Wall was built.
The other theme of the day was lead. We picked up several small pieces in this area yesterday, but the frequency picked up significantly today. A huge mass of lead fragments had turned up on the floor of an immediately adjacent space, reflecting its use a workshop. The lead in our trench is therefore presumed to be from redistribution of that material when the workshop was decommissioned, following construction of the Antonine annexe. A sample of the pieces – appearing to be either clippings from larger sheets or splashes during pouring of molten metal – is shown below.
Here’s the end of day view, with the upper section also cleared down to a black layer that (it seems to me) matches that of the oven.
As we left the trench at 4pm Marta and Penny appeared to be setting up the drone again, so there’s a real possibility our field of stones will finally bite the dust tomorrow morning. If so, we should finally reap the reward of all that effort to expose them last week.
Digging Vindolanda 