Another day of glorious sunshine and tropical heat here in Rousay, hope the weather stays as good for our Open Day tomorrow. We’ve been working today to coincide with the Open Days at the Skaill Dig, but it’s not all been hard work.
It’s very important for all the students and volunteers to know what’s going on with the site - it’s very easy on any dig to get stuck with your head down a hole somewhere & have no idea what’s happening in the rest of the site. Steve & Julie (our esteemed & glorious leaders) always make a point of organising regular site tours. We’ve also got an osteoarchaeologist on site – Jackie McKinley – and she gave the students a tour of the tomb. She’s famous actually – you may have seem her on TV - Meet the Ancestors – she’s sacrificed her annual holiday to help us dig. Not sure what she's pointing at there though!
I remember working for Steve & Julie (our esteemed & glorious leaders) in Sanday & they would insist on giving us the site tour on the first morning back after our day off, & everyone had such huge hangovers it was all a bit wasted on us. Different times! These days (shock horror!) students actually seem to work at Uni & get decent degrees!
A case in point here is Joe who has worked at Swandro for 4 seasons and spent his placement year on post excavation. The bug of the site caught him so much that he decided to miss his graduation in order to stay on site. A big thank you and congratulations on your first class honours degree in Archaeology.
Did we mention we had a stone-lined tank in the Peedie Roundhouse? Here it is – big enough to have a bath in:
