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chris-watkins writes:
From March 30th to April 6th, I participated in the excavation that took place at Stonehenge. However the excavation continued until April 13th. The excavation was part of the Stonehenge - Presseli Bluestone project run by Tim Darvill (Bournemouth University) and Geoff Wainwright. the aim of the excavation was to uncover the early bluesone sockets from the first stage of the building of the stone circle.
The first day was largely a press release day, while the turf was removed and there after the dig started in ernest. The 2.5m - by - 3.5m trench was surrounded by wooden boards and a nearby blue stone was proteced with a foam cover.
Finds from the first day included mainly Post-medieval material - such as glass, pipe and porcelain. This material came from the backfill that was part of Atkinson's trench in 1964 which, cut into the trench that was dug in 2008.
The following day (Day Two) saw more finds coming out of the backfill. This was aided by the large 1cm mesh sieve that was placed over our spoil heap. Day Three was very exciting, not only had the bluestone sockets been exposed. But I had found a piece of Beaker pottery (sadly unstratified from the 1964 backfill and not from the undisturbed 2008 section of the trench).
The following days saw the 2008 section being divided into 50cm2 squares. The squares were each given a letter and all soil was maticulously looked through. With all spoil being sent for environmental sampling to gain as much information as possible.
My last few days of the excavation were based largely on finds processing (washing and sorting) and environmental processing (wet sieving and the carrying of samples from site to the compound - in car park).
Finds processing involved the sorting of finds from each context into foreign stone (sarsen and the all important bluestone), flint (worked and unworked both counted and weighed - which was sorted by Phil Harding), burnt material (weighed) and other items (clay pipe, glass, pottery etc.) and animal bone (mainly sheep and rabbit).
The results from this was that a large quantity of flint and burnt material had come out of the 1964 section of the trench and all this was sorted and looked at by Phil Harding (Time Team).
As all the flint every spit that was taken a context was sorted into worked and unworked flint- each was then weighed and counted. From sorting through all of this, a number of flint tools and hammer stones were found.
The large quantity of environmental samples were wet sieved, through 0.5mm mesh for the 2008 section and 1mm mesh for the 1964 backfill (as specified by English Heritage). Several buckets were taken from both the 1964 section and the new 2008 section of the trench. With samples being taken from every square as the digging progressed down to the chalk bedrock and stone sockets.
The last day that I was there, saw snowfall in the early hours of the morning and later mid-afternoon. While subsequent days were colder work carried on. As the stone sockets were revealed and recorded. Notable finds from this last week included more Beaker pottery, a Roman coin and other flint tools. A conclusion of the findings and a more detailed daily report (includes videos) can be seen on the BBC timewatch website.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/stonehenge/
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