Sunday Special No 3: We dig, dig dig...

I've had a week off from my normal job at the Circumlocution Office, leaving the colleagues to wrap things in red tape and generate memos in triplicate.

Instead, I've been digging up Roman Dorcester on Thames  - my third year there. I've never studied archaeology, though it's something that has almost interested me. (When I was at school I volunteered to help out in a resistivity survey of Vale Royal Abbey - the technique was in its infancy then, rather than the sophisticated stuff you see on Time Team we had to record the readings in a notebook and then type then into an Oric-1 compute to generate an image.)

What I've been doing at Dorchester is volunteering to help with a long running project to understand better the development of this Roman town, and especially its transition into the later medieval town. Dorchester was once a very important place - it had its own Abbey, its own saint, and the Saxon King Cynegils was baptised there. The Roman town lay on the road between Alcester and Silchester (and as a coin dating to around 72AD was found last week under the road, we now know the road was built after that).

The volunteers on the project include local residents like me, people doing various extra mural archaeology course including at Oxford, more conventional students and others - we're a very eclectic lot. I just wanted to get involved and I've found it great fun doing something totally different from my normal life, being outside and getting some exercise (my FitBit got very excited) and - best of all - not being in charge. (Encouragingly, my knees didn't ache as much this year as the past two so all the exercise dogwalking seems to be paying off).

I always seem to have good luck with the rain on these weeks, and apart from one iffy morning there was no time lost this year (and that was because of overnight rain which made the clayey site rather treacherous - we were all set to cleaning finds while things dried out). But on Saturday the skies opened and it rained all day, so the timing was very, very good. (The site is covered over and filled in again to protect it till next year: I am glad I didn't have that job to do).

Yes, David, I hear you ask. That's all very well, but what did you FIND? The answer is - this year - not that much, plenty of pottery and bone and a few Roman nails. The interest was mainly focussed on resolving which bits of coloured earth overlay which other bits, as part of establishing a detailed sequence for the site and (eventually) working out what was going on. So I was doing things like taking away a brown deposit which overlay an orange deposit and then helping to record the result. This is where my lack of training kicks in - there were supervisors who understood the techniques in play (such as when to decide that the context had changed) and I just did as I was told.

That isn't to say nothing out of the ordinary turned up - there were several Roman brooches found, for example, as well as some lovely bits of pottery, one quite early and with a maker's stamp.

As well as digging, we also had some lectures/ talks ranging from the practical (archaeological photography, processing of finds) to the theoretical (how the modern view of the Roman countryside and its occupants is coloured by centuries of modern prejudice against peasants, for example - that one was VERY thought provoking, given by a research student working on the subject and I'll be interested to see what comes of the whole idea).

So, a week of sun (mainly), moving earth, plentiful teabreaks (VERY important) and moments of excitement).

I took some pictures and here are my highlights.

The site overall. The heap of soil at the back came out of here and everything removed had to be wheelbarrowed to the top!

In the middle is the pit in which I spent most of the week. The brown blob in the centre is where I was digging for the last two days. The north-south road runs across the far side (north is left, as is modern Dorchester).

I found this on Thursday just before the end of the day and had to leave it overnight. I got very excited - might it be a complete pot with something interesting inside?

Well, might it?

Er, no. Just a broken rim.

I found that broken rim towards the top of this photo, which shows the orange underlying the brown fill (you just see the change in the section across the middle)

Moving on and turning round 180 degrees: I didn't dig this bit, it's the very bottom of the site, where after several years, natural gravel has been reached. Note all the labels which tag the different contexts - supervisor stuff...

Coda: this was the site two days later, on Sunday 23rd. Ready for the spoil to go back in, protecting everything till Spring. (Note Portaloos, tool shed and site office in the background).