This year the Autumn site opened on the 2rd May. As usual the first few days consisted of clearing up the ravages of the previous winter. Removing fallen branches, clearing pathways, and what seemed like a ton of leaves from the trenches, - then clearing and cleaning the trenches to enable excavation to re-commence.
At the beginning of May trench 6, the culvert looked like this.
It was decided to excavate the whole of the trench, this was done mainly during the training week in august, disappointingly, no significant finds were made. Later a small ‘dog-leg’ was dug as it appeared that the culvert had a slight change of direction. See following photos, the first is at the end of the training week, the second on a frost covered day when the site was being checked. The trench is covered by sacking and plastic fertilizer bags held down by bricks.
A new tent for the training week was purchased, a vast improvement on the previous one. As usual with such items, the instructions were not too
clear. First picture – How many pieces? Second, we think this way up!
I said this bit went there…..
The finished tent.
This tent was very useful on the wet days during the training week as we were able to give talks, examine and draw finds, & get to know the Dumpy Level in comparative comfort.
Excavation continued in trench 1 throughout the season, the level was brought down over the main area.
This is feature 20 in trench1, the sealed context, at the beginning of the season. The finds in this feature date approximately to between 1700-1730. Finds include many dress making pins & pins of many purposes, pieces of clay pipes, many samples of broken pottery and glass and what can only be described as general household rubbish. By the end of the season all the fill shown here had been cleared.
There was one intriguing item found in 20. Illustrated here, to indicate its size it is shown beside a one penny coin. It had a very carefully scratched design on one side, its overall shape was oval. Not a button as there is no fixing point, and no sign of it having been set in anything as some form of decoration. Someone suggested that it may have had a Masonic connection as we had found a Masonic clay pipe in another part of trench 1.The Masonic museum was contacted and the curator said that it only had two of three points necessary for confirmation as a Masonic item, apparently it lacked a pickaxe!
The 2009 season at Autumn was shorter than normal, for many reasons the site did not open until the 2nd of May and due to commitments (the BAG annual holiday in October) the site was closed on 4th October; the last weekend largely a tidying up time, covering trenches and making the site secure for the coming winter. Several saturdays & sundays were rained off and some weekends were cancelled due to other work such as helping the WW11 event at Shooters Hill and also the resistivity work at Farningham. Finds for the season were a little disappointing but you cannot find an annular brooch every day.
The following photo is to show just how much hard work archaeology is:
