Funny sort of day weather wise - thick fog at first, which lifted a bit but completely still and hot and muggy with loads of annoying flies landing on us, in our tea, flying into our mouths etc etc. It did at least stay dry although at one point it looked like we were in for some serious weather it passed us by. Eventually the sun came out and we ended the day in T-shirts & factor 50 sun cream. Dry did mean we could get on with the excavation, with Jackie carrying on work in her Pictish building, which produced yesterday's mystery find (start of yesterday's dig diary entry):
She also came up with today's star find, a bone spindle whorl from the same area, probably made from a femoral head:
Interestingly some of the suggestions we had for our mystery object were a thread winder or an object for helping to ply flax or wool, keeping the threads separate prior to plying - we'll keep you posted.
We also had some unusual finds from the midden in our Iron Age roundhouse, firstly some strangely arranged toothless cattle mandibles, which looked like they'd been deliberately laid against each other:
Not far away Alice had an articulated bird skeleton which took a lot of careful cleaning, this must presumably also have been deliberately placed - unless it got brought in by an Iron Age cat I suppose:
Alice could hardly stand up after crouching the bird for so long, but the end result was worth it:
On a slightly more cheerful avian note our eider ducks called past again today as usual and still appeared to have both ducklings - Titch & Quackers - with them although they're getting quite big now - they grow up so fast!
Weather forecast is looking not too bad for tomorrow, although the mist has rolled in again, so we're hoping to finish off our week with a decent day - Friday's our day off but we're working on Saturday again if you want to come and visit us.