Digging 4: Plans

Oh, dear.
Only managed two photos today. Very quick, so no thought to composition. Apologies to all.
There seems to be some interest in the process of archaeology, however, so I'll put this up and hope that the write-up excuses the lack of artistic merit.

This is part of the recording process that an archaeological site goes through. Here, I'm planning the cemetery area of the site; drawing a map, as it were, of the features I can make out on the ground at a scale of 1:20.
The squares on the yellow planning frames are 20cm on a side, so they are represented by a 1cm square on the graph paper. This plan will form a (hopefully) accurate record of what we found before we start to remove layers and skeletons and things.
It's not the sort of thing you see on Time Team ;) They show the digging, and there's a secret 4th day when all the recording work gets done.
An archaeological dig is a destructive process. Every time I remove a trowelful of a Medieval deposit, all the information about what it was made of, how it was deposited, whether it was on top of, or adjacent to, or below any other bit of soil, is lost forever. So we photograph and draw plans and sections and write up meticulous descriptions on paper before we remove the material. Then we remove it (taking samples the while, and keeping all the bones, pot, metalwork or whatever from that particular pit-fill, or grave, or foundation-trench, assigning each a unique number) Then we draw plans and sections and take photographs of what everything looks like once the deposit has been removed.

Then we move on to the next deposit.






In other news, my Dad is finally getting out of hospital on Monday. He wasn't particularly ill for the last couple of weeks, but he needed to have a Care Plan in place, before they let him out. The Plan that they had worked out for him before he went into hospital was not implemented (because he got a bit weak and feverish) so became invalid, and a new Plan had to be drawn up for when he left the hospital. This new Plan is exactly the same as the old Plan.
Also, Meles has backblipped!