SERF blog

Hello everyone, it’s Zane who’s giving an update on Castle Craig today. It was great to get back up to the broch again after being away for two days (Mondays are our days off and yesterday was my turn to do a walkover survey).

A short step aside here: although there are many aspects and tricks to learn of excavation itself, we do and learn more than digging and recording here. Alongside the excavations as such, SERF is a credited fieldwork for students, so we also learn, for example, how to do topographic and standing building survey, data entry and processing into the database; we have fieldtrips and lectures on various aspects of archaeology. Tonight’s lecture was on conservation of different materials, for instance. Thanks to all the organizers and teachers!

Back to Castle Craig now. It was a really productive day today, and I saw a lot of smiley faces, despite the wind and Scottish mist which were really loyal companions of ours, not leaving us unattended even for a moment. Alex in the Trench Eight was our star today. She was the first one to get into her trench in the morning and two seconds later her excitement draw all of us around (most of us hadn’t even managed to set up for the work at that point!). Similar episodes repeated themselves over and over again all day long, adding to our small finds list a sherd of decorated Samian pottery, an animal bone fragment and a tooth, a wooden bowl-shape object with brass studs and others.

Meanwhile, quite a lot of photographs were taken, a plan and a section drawn (hinting that we have, at places, got quite deep down) – a rather slow, but at times tricky and very crucial recording work which has to be done in order to go farther and be able to reconstruct the trenches later on. Trench Eight is the only one where we still have not revealed the inner edge of the broch’s wall. Maybe tomorrow?

Also, we had some visitors at the Castle Craig today, including members from the Historic Scotland. As I said – a productive day! Let’s keep it up!