Decided today that I've had enough of bling, and so the star of today's dig diary is this blocked entrance into the 1st century AD section of the subdivided roundhouse, blocked up when that section finally went out of use:
It's been very neatly done as you can see, and unlike many of the walls on site is still standing just as it was when it was new. How many walls in your own house are going to look so good in 2,000 years time?
Elsewhere again lots of cleaning up rubble, recording it then removing it was going on, I'm not sure what everyone's grinning at in this shot but I'm fairly sure that there are some sarcastic comments about my attempts at site photography thrown in there:
Michal, one of the Bradford undergraduates, has been learning survey techniques and how to use the EDM under Gavin's care, and proudly announced that he was now a surveyor, and he'd even been given his very own surveyor's notebook:
I seem to recall from my own surveying days that the trick was to not trip over the legs of the tripod more than once a day, and if you could master that you were well on your way to success.
Elsewhere Tom and Bonnie decided that they needed to re-enact one of the Viking burials from the nearby Westness cemetery, using Sarah as the victim. They were moving the spoil anyway, to backfill a corner of the site that we're not going to be reopening, so it seemed a shame to waste a good hole.
Finally there's a silage related incident to report, one of the signboards that points people on the way to site from the path by Midhowe tomb had a run in with a runaway silage bale and came off a bit the worse for wear:
There's steep hills up the ways from the coast and when they're baling & wrapping silage they have to be careful that the round bales are set down parallel to the slope, not pointing straight down the slope or they go for a roll. This was one that got away and went straight through a crumbling (now flattened) section of wall & over our board. I did managed to wrench it back into roughly the right shape so hopefully no-one will get lost, but I don't know how they're going to retrieve that bale!
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