Today was a day off - a much needed break for all after a busy and exciting week in the heat. Although we were relaxing and taking in the local sites in Strathearn, the conservator at AOC Archaeology was very busy examining the material from the cist retrieved from the henge site. She X-rayed some of the lumps of material and one of the X-rays clearly shows the bronze object to be a dagger! And after some more careful examination it appears that the handle has been enlaid with gold bands...this is truly a magnificent find. More will follow as the examination continues.
Tessa
Day 7: 09/08/09
Sunday was full of recording and planning. Sami writes about his experience at the Forteviot henge site - the process of excavation
As before, the workday started after a hearty breakfast at 9 am. Today I was working at the large henge site at Forteviot. My first job was to take an area down around an inch, so that any stone features and the colours in the soil would be more prominent. Not the most exciting job in the world, but it has to be done if we want to get anywhere. That took me most of the day, but seeing the features clear as day was worth it. For lunch, we had sandwiches with pickle and a meat of unknown origin. For some strange reason, I was apparently the only one that liked them.
After lunch I was assigned my very own feature to dig, a suspected posthole on the southern side of the trench. It was about a meter in diameter, and next to another posthole that was already being excavated. I began by cleaning out the edges of the feature, with the goal of identifying a ramp that would have been used to lower the post into the hole. Had a good start by finding a quartz flake, but unfortunately we couldn’t identify a ramp. We remained unfazed by this setback and separated the feature into 2 halves, one of which I will be excavating as a means to give us a good look into the function of the pit. Right after we set up the dividing line, it started to rain cats and dogs, causing us to promptly retreat back to our lodgings.
Sami
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