Week Two Trials
I am happy to report the completion of the first three squares excavated at Smallpox Bay - and our first surprise of the season: the south post hole line of the large building we are investigating seems to have stopped at 33 feet, an odd length given English buildings tend to have lengths in increments of four feet.
We found one post hole as expected with the same large diameter as the others in the line but then nothing three feet further along. The ground does slope sharply between the two spots, raising the possibility that the original topography in this area had more than three feet of soil, and thus a post hole in the expected position would not have needed to cut into bedrock. Alternatively, there may have been a door in this particular spot, which would result in a gap greater than three feet.
My guiding mantra in the field is to go from the known to the unknown, so when we resume excavations tomorrow, we will open a new unit further along the line to detect an over-large gap in the post line, but also excavate at a right angle from the last post hole to see if we have indeed found the corner and have the east wall running north to join the north wall post line.
Andrew, Lexi, Rebecca and Rosa have been real troopers excavating these sharply sloping units with challenging topography and lots of roots. 1970s plastic and Bud bottles have given way to Westerwald, tin-glazed earthenware, large mammal and fish bone, two "VR" Royal Engineers buttons, odd fragments of red-bodied green-glazes Borderware, and other exciting stuff.
Valerie has jump started the Archaeology Lab and kicked it into high gear with our first Bermudian volunteers, the indefatigable Martin and Eleanor and Rachel, and newcomer Cowan. We have begun working through processing flotation samples (and total post hole feature collection) from 2024 and then picking through the fine-mesh recovery samples for extremely tiny remains. No seeds yet, but very small bones, chert chips, and small copper pins have all been painstakingly recovered.
When did we have the time to do all this fine-grained work? After a very soggy half-day of digging in the rain Wednesday, we were confined to Paget Island on Thursday with 20-30kt winds. 
Indeed, we have had more rain in June already than the entire month's typical average. I am hoping this is a karmic front-loading of all interruptions and that we will have perfect weather hereafter...rather than the early days of a washed out season. Perhaps libations and other sacrifices are urgently needed...
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Valerie lecturing on the many ways archaeologists interpret various types of artifacts
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