Today we met this week’s students on the Wessex Archaeology 2007 Training Excavation, who will be excavating with us at Down Farm in Dorset. These include two familiar faces, who have visited us before, and one young lady who has traveled all the way from Australia to come on the dig! Incredible!
The day began in the same way as it did last Monday, with introductions and a health and safety briefing. Once these unexciting but necessary preliminaries were out of the way we set off with Martin Green for his short tour of Down Farm and a visit to the museum. This is an excellent way of familiarizing our diggers with the type of archaeology they may encounter and provides a gentle start to the week. But enough of that, let the hard work commence!
Fortunately for this team, the site has already been cleaned by last week’s group, for which we are very grateful! This means that we can crack straight on with the excavation. Dave Godden, one of Wessex Archaeology’s Project Officers, who is running this week’s dig, began the afternoon with a brief introduction on how to half section a feature. After this everyone was assigned their own posthole. Throughout the course of the week they will be responsible for digging and fully recording their posthole. What they find out about their size, shape and fill will add important detail to our plan of the site. This will help us to work out the origin and purpose of the postholes and increase our understanding of the early inhabitants of Down Farm.