Our day on site began dry and bright with new volunteers eager to uncover the history of Pan. We started the morning session with more digging on a new strip of land to the west of yesterday’s dig area.
Our diggers found a number of exciting and interesting objects including complete glass bottles and marbles, as well as coloured glass, ceramics and rusted metal. One of our excavators found a number of pig bones, probably from the same animal and another found an intact ‘Daddy’s Favourite Sauce’ bottle! Our other star find of the morning was a complete bone toothbrush with the makers name and ‘Newport’ stamped onto the handle, telling us it was made right here on the island!
After a break we moved onto washing the finds and left them in the sun to dry for the afternoon session.
During lunch break some of yesterday afternoon’s volunteers came to the site eager to dig and spent a productive hour finding even more artefacts than they did yesterday.
In the afternoon rain threatened but it didn’t dissuade our volunteers from getting stuck in. We had some new faces digging, including adults from the Medina centre, and some old hands from yesterday and from the morning session. Among the things they found were: a Bovril jar, parts of a horse’s bridle, a ceramic doll’s head (still with blue eyes painted on), a coin, several decorated metal buttons, glass beads and parts of a ceramic figurine.
Two young ladies from yesterday’s dig session returned to complete their excavation of the jaw bone mentioned in yesterday’s blog. It turned out to be the upper jaw bone of a pig, which had a white ceramic jar-lid buried underneath. Exciting stuff!
Halfway through the afternoon’s session we felt the first smattering of rain. Despite this our volunteers pressed on with excavation and finds washing. We also began a new activity, marking the finds with their site code and context numbers so that in the future they can be related back to this specific site.
The rain worsened as the session finished, but to the credit of all our excavators everyone left with a smile.
NEWS FLASH – A selection of finds from this week’s excavation will be on display in the Isobel centre, next to Downside school, on Friday from 13.00 hours. Everyone is welcome to come and view the display.