The second week of the 2006 training excavation at Down Farm began with the arrival of fifteen new trainee archaeologists, all from different backgrounds and with varying levels of archaeological experience. The day was structured similarly to last Monday, with introductions to the team and to the site, and a tour of the museum.
After lunch everyone made their way to the site. This week’s team will be working in part of the area opened at the end of last week, adjacent to our previous excavations. On what turned out to be a very warm September afternoon, we cleaned the area using hoes, brooms and shovels. This revealed a large number of postholes spread across our excavation area, as well as several larger features which are likely to be pits. The number of features in this part of the site exceeds anything we have seen before on training excavations at Down Farm, meaning that our team have a lot of work to do this week!
Excavation began in the afternoon and already we have found burnt and worked flint, pottery and some fragments of animal bone within the postholes. The features, and the material within them, clearly suggest that there was a lot of prehistoric activity in this area, and hopefully our excavations this week will reveal more about some of the earliest inhabitants of Down Farm.
