Started today with a quick clean up of the trench so Steve (Dockrill, site co-director) could play with his new toy and get some drone photos of the flagging coming through, although maybe I should rephrase that or I might get a walloping in the morning, what I really mean of course is that our esteemed director launched his invaluable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in order to record for posterity the excellent flagging in Area F:
Seriously though we now have two UAV operators on site, with Lindsay our resident expert who's been doing this for years, now busy showing Steve the ropes, and the photos you can get are amazing. No more standing on top of a scaffolding photo tower trying to get an aerial shot of the site, just launch this tiny little helicopter thingy with a high res camera and away you go. No idea how they manage to take photos on a typical windy Orkney day without loads of camera shake, but they do.
Mind you they wouldn't be any use to pose on for a team photo like we used to do way back in the day:
Following the cleaning and recording it was back to taking the next spit down, and the flagging is spreading and looking much more convincing as a surface, there also seems to be a certain amount of collapsed walling in the trench. No sign of an rich (and dateable) midden yet, but we're getting there:
And just in case you're wondering about the klegg situation, they flew up in clouds this morning and started to attack immediately we stepped out of the site Landy, and kept it up most of the day until the rain came on, so everyone's well and truly bitten. Klegg bites always itch more the day after, so everyone'll be scratching like mad tomorrow. Ho hum, the things we do for archaeology!