Update #1 From The Field (Ewan Shannon)

June 05, 2023

Update #1 From The Field (Ewan Shannon)

Blogging duties are being shared this season among team leaders.
This dispatch is by Field Supervisor Ewan Shannon.

Despite an impressive amount of rain, our team has answered the challenge equally impressively, and we have plenty of progress to show for our first two weeks. As our crew members settle into the rhythm of the site, we have been pairing them up so that those who are new to archaeology can have the benefit of an experienced partner. These pairs have been working well together, and for the most part have taken on good site practices fairly quickly. For example, sometimes new diggers can be prone to “bowling” their units (having their walls taper as they go down rather than being nice and vertical) but that’s not the case for this group! I’ve only had to ask people to fix their walls a couple of times. Straight walls mean a happy supervisor.

Picking up where we paused at the end of last year, we know we have a large and deep feature in the northeast of our site; one of our goals has been exposing it in its entirety so we can get to the bottom of it- literally. Our running theory is that it’s some sort of cellar or storage area, with a possible hearth right next to it. In general, a rule of thumb in Archaeology is that you work from the “known” and follow it into the “unknown”, and that has been our approach as we decide where to assign our team on site.

Hannah and Mike tidying up our Locus A feature

From years prior, we are aware of a concentration of various post holes on the site and their linear profiles. We then project their direction and open up units where we expect to find others. The team members have shown flexibility and patience as I bounce them around the site trying to pinpoint many of these. We’re just as interested in where they are absent as where they are present, since establishing the absence of these features helps refine the scope of our site and narrow down where to dig.

We’ve already accomplished the union of Locus A and Locus B, two previously disconnected regions of our site which are now united after clearing four units in the very south of A and the very north of B. While doing this, we encountered a twist. Usually the odd features reveal themselves near the end of the season, but in the first week, the team came down on a moderately sized rectangular feature. We’re hoping to circle back to this feature at a later time.

Although most of our attention is focused on Locus A, Keegan and Tristan have been hard at work in the very south of Locus B. After establishing the edges of another large feature that Jared uncovered in 2022, we’ve since moved them east in the hopes of locating the cooking area used by British Army groups stationed here during Yellow Fever outbreaks. For a site that housed so many quarantining soldiers, we have been unable to see much evidence of large-scale food preparation - the standing ruin conspicuously lacks a chimney.

As for our progress: As of today, we have expanded our existing site by 27 one meter- squared units, and assigned 58 contexts (distinct layers of soil in a unit) that are either complete or in progress, with even more artifact bags sent to the lab for artifact washing and databasing. Most significantly, we have uncovered 40 new post hole features of various sizes, as well as the flat square cut stone area previously mentioned and a long trench-like feature that is emerging east of the Locus A pit.