Day Three at the Roman site on the Nailbourne

Trench A gets deeper, more finds and a large animal skeleton unexpectedly appears.

Sally writes: Trench B is 10m by 2m and some further distance back from the Nailbourne river than Trench A. After the topsoil (2000) was removed, the burned layer (2001) with the modern nails, revealed previously, was removed. Elsewhere under (2000) a loamy layer with few inclusions was revealed. The chalk ‘linear’ with animal bones (2005) which crosses the trench was hypothesised to be the fill of a robber trench because it was on the line of an interior wall as identified by the ground penetrating radar.

The spoil from all the contexts is being put in separate labelled piles, so that any metal objects found by the metal detectorist can be assigned to the correct context.

Once context (2005) is removed, the layers beneath are expected to contain an abundance of material. Therefore we will start to keep bucket tallies. This will enable a record to be kept of the volumes of spoil removed from each context, so that the number of finds per volume of soil can be calculated which will enable comparison between sites.

At the end of the day, the hypotheses will have been refined / changed / updated, and Lacey will give a video tour of the trench to update us.BPK16---Day-3---Trench-A IMG_0928 IMG_0939 IMG_0940 IMG_6638 IMG_6639 IMG_6640 IMG_6641 IMG_6642