I'm just back from a four week placement with the York Archaeological Trust (helping out on the ArchLive! training dig), and as I'm stuck in my new (tiny) flat with my dog and no furniture, I thought I'd take the student experience as far as possible and start working on something useless. So here's a new article! First, I'd like to thank the trainees and the supervisors again for all their help, hard work and singing rooster impersonations. I had a great time and almost didn't want to come home (but then I thought about the food and the weather and I changed my mind).
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| Non-staged photos of my awesome trainees, weeks 2-4. |
Second, I'd like to tell anybody who's got an interest for field archaeology and a bit of spare money (or a lot, if they don't happen to live in the UK) that if they're looking for a training dig, they should look no further. ArchLive! runs every summer in York and allows trainees to do a bit of everything, from digging to planning, finds processing and barbecuing. And if you've spent so much time volunteering on digs that you're as poor as a Church mouse (yes, there is a theme developing here), you can apply for a placement position and spend your days running wheelbarrows, demolishing brick inspection chambers, cracking tasteless jokes and passing on your extensive knowledge to your amazed trainees. For more information, see
ArchLive!'s facebook page, their
site diaries or their
website.
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| Conscientiously scrubbing Victorian grime off pots and pipes. |
I'll leave the site interpretation to the YAT people, as I have a sneaking suspicion that some out-of-place feature is going to contradict everything we thought we knew about the back yards of the rather shabby Victorian terraced houses of Carmelite Street, their bad builders and their failed attempts at improving sanitation. Suffice it to say that I have proudly excavated two ceramic tipper toilets and a palimpsest of drainpipes, puzzling brick structures, walls and rubbly make-up deposits. The toilets (which require the tipper to be full of water for the flushing mechanism to do its job) have been put in in several contiguous back yards, seemingly during one improvement phase, in order to try and make the sanitary conditions of the houses more acceptable, but they clearly didn't meet the health and safety requirements as all the houses were pulled down in the 1930s. To my despair, my placement was over before the whole drainage system was exposed, and I'll have to wait for the supervisors' conclusions as to how exactly the whole thing worked and why it wasn't so great.
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| A non-scaled, north arrow-less picture of the tipper toilet of 11 Carmelite Street. Take that, good archaeological practices. |
Anyway. Thanks to the magic of single context recording, we now all master the difficult arts of taming the dumpy level, off-setting and drawing plans, filling in context cards in a fraction of a second, and taking lovely scaled pictures. A few exciting finds came out of "my" section (anything excavated by "my" trainees is "mine". That's just how it works). A clay pipe bowl with a different man in profile on each side, a nude woman from another clay pipe, some bits of medieval pottery, a bead and a potential giant dog tooth, but no dead prostitute.
We were lucky enough to get quite a lot of sun, so we were able to sit outside and enjoy the weather while processing finds, ie washing a load of Victorian rubbish and of dead people from a nearby medieval charnel that was being excavated by YAT too. We had more fun than would be considered "normal" or "sane" trying to match bones together and got a bit sad whenever we pulled children's bones out of their plastic bags, but it was all very interesting. Sorting and bagging finds went smoothly enough, and sorting small bits of shell, charcoal and other sieving residues from soil samples was more fun than it sounds (a little bit). So I might just have to go back next year and
visit more pubs do more archaeology. Or maybe I should get a job? Who knows.
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| Evaaaa! Pass me my trowel! |
