Sieves and stones...

Star volunteer of the day today is Ellen, all the way from Pennsylvania, who comes for a fortnight every year and spends her whole time sieving. Everyone else runs a mile at the suggestion they go on the sieves but Ellen enjoys it so much she asks that we just let her do it all day long, plus she stays unflinchingly cheerful in the face of rain, wind and muddy feet. All this despite having to commute from Kirkwall to Rousay via bus and ferry every day: Ellen we salute you!

The rest of us were busy on a whole site photo clean, it was too windy to fly the drone but that didn't stop good old fashioned terrestrial photography taking place:

Michal has been let loose with the photogrammetry equipment otherwise known as the camera on a stick, and in typical Michal fashion was happy to pose for a photo with it before getting to work:

Here he is in action with his serious face on, these photos will enable a 3-D model of the site to be built up by our photogrammetry supremo Lindsey:

We also had a very special visitor today, Professor Ian Ralston, Emeritus Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, who was kind enough to pose for a photo with one of our information boards.

Star find of the day went to Rose with this worked stone, possibly an ingot mould or at the very least a small trough to be used maybe as a mortar (as in mortar and pestle)

Here it is in close up so you can see the trough a bit better:

Elsewhere Karla was hard at it in her side cell, not quite sure what she was explaining to me here as I took the pic, maybe should start taking notes

And finally...there was a perfectly good reason for Caz & Alice to be doing this which made perfect sense at the time and caused a great deal of hilarity on site, perhaps this should be a caption competition?

That's us off for our site weekend, tune in on Sunday for another exciting instalment.