Leadketty trench

Hi its’ Daniel from Leadketty here. I’ll be giving you an account of the days’ work at Trench Three, which I am trainee supervising.

Work has been progressing after the couple of days' bad weather, and we had a full trench of people digging, planning and surveying. We had Alan, Martin, Sabine, Sarah and Vesa in the postholes of the avenue and palisaded enclosure and some volunteers uncovering the Eastern most palisade post holes, so the pre excavation drawing could be completed. This was a great find by Lawrence and his two sons, as this has allowed for the missing postholes of the palisade to be projected as, our hypothesis that the palisade post holes in this area of the trench are as close to 2.6 meters in distance apart. Hopefully we can find a couple more in the horrible silty layer of soil that has washed through the middle of the trench.

Myself and Aoife were supervising the students and helping in the recording process. Also, pre-ex planning a particularly awkward area of the trench, with some hard to see linear features and some shattered ploughed stone, which has been very very very tentatively spoken of as a possible ploughed through cairn!

However the most exciting news on site was the discovery of Grooved Ware, a type of Neolithic pottery, in the avenue postholes, which called for the Groovy Ware dance to be enacted! In terms of the wider research aims of the project this is very significant, as in the previous palisaded enclosure excavations at Forteviot in 2010, no pottery whatsoever was in the avenue or palisaded postholes, which suggests that something very different was going on in the structure at Leadketty.

All in all, this was a fantastic day on site, with some great laughs and ridiculous four seasons in one day Scottish weather. Tonight is the Archaeology Quiz, compared by the venerable Jeremy Hugget, which should provide a couple of hilarious moments. Hope to see you at the open day on Sunday at Dunning, where we’ll have some of the amazing finds from not only Leadketty but the broch site at Castle Craig as well!! What a treat.