THIS IS HOW IT WORKS – or – when its all over how do they know where all the finds came from in the site. Those who can spot a boring old lesson coming up can now close there eyes. First of all someone undertakes a Geophysical survey of the area. Triangulation survey points are set in place and a level of the area is taken. On the East Wear Bay site everything is slipping towards the sea and at
...Read more
Digging carries on apace and interesting finds are popping out of the ground as we go along. A piece of pot turned up with some of the potters mark on it – ERT – immediately christened BERT by the diggers. However our leader told me how to look him up on the internet and he turns out ot be SM [ERTU] CCOS – The diggers now have another variation but I leave that to your imagination. Another piece of
...Read more
A Town Unearthed – 22nd August 2011 The history of our Villa is getting quite interesting and complicated. Once we had removed the fallen walling from the courtyard we found underneath a large area of Roman roof tiles. No Classis Britannica in this deposit, but we took out twenty five sacks of the stuff. I can see plenty of work for the processors over the winter. This area is like layer cake that has broken up and the layers have
...Read more
A TOWN UNEARTHED – 31ST AUGUST 2011 Lurking underneath all those courtyard cobbles and stones was a layer of GREEN clay waiting to make our lives a misery. Just scrape off that layer over here or over there and expose the GREEN layer was the order of the day.. Thank you Fairy Godmother for sending some rain at decent intervals. The layers were baked hard and because the GREEN was broken up and had been trampled upon (not by us)
...Read more
The Quern and the loaf – or – Bread out of a stone! The other day our leader thought it would be an exercise in experimental archaeological if I worked with Katie (from Texas) and use our quern stone to grind some corn and record how long it took to produce enough flour to make a loaf. As the capstone tended to slip off downhill we had to borrow Richards little spirit level and use bits of stone and useless
...Read more
All those stones that Andy drew have all been photographed and taken away. We seem to be building another dry stone wall. It will get bigger as there are more stones underneath the ones we have just removed. During all this carting away we found various coins, iron tools, some lead and lots of rusty nails and other finds which tells us that the Villa was still occupied around AD390. The stones underneath appear to be another earlier courtyard that
...Read more
