Day 5

WA Archaeologist, Hans and Harthill volunteer Sarah inspect a find in the spoil heap that she found using a metal detector.

After a downpour of rain overnight, we arrived on site and discovered that our marquee (base camp) had been demolished and was broken by the weight of the rain. We attempted to remove the cover without spilling too much water into our seating area. However, best made plans and all that…we ended up with the water running into the area where we gather each day to have our breaks. Oh dear! and other Anglo-Saxon words were muttered under my breath. :-)

We covered the wet area with cardboard to mop the water up and to make the ground less hazardous to walk on. We also had to wipe our tables and chairs down so that we could use them later on at lunchtime.

After wiping everything down, our worry now was, were the trenches full of water. Thankfully they weren’t. However, the footpath we had created was now like a swamp in places and treacherous underfoot. Mili, the ever resourceful WA Manager decided to take this opportunity (“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”) to teach some experimental archaeology to some of the volunteers along with members of the WA team and they recreated an Iron-Age footpath using broken branches to line the path through swampy areas of the path and it worked a treat!

A number of the trenches were cleaned, photographed, and recorded and 8 volunteers from Harthill came along and got involved and tried their hand at some of the many different jobs under the expert guidance of the WA team.

One volunteer, Sarah was shown how they use metal detectors to inspect the spoil heaps (the soil that has been removed from the trenches). Soil is sieved to ensure that small items of archaeology are not discarded and lost, and the metal detector is used over the whole spoil heap to double-check that no other pieces of archaeology are missed.

Our 8 volunteers from Harthill were, myself, Olivia, Helen, Si, Andy, Sarah, Julie and Tim. All came along and got stuck in and had a great day with the Wessex Archaeology team. The volunteers moved from trench to trench to try their hand at different jobs and ended the day saying how much they had enjoyed themselves. Who would have thought that digging holes in the ground was so much fun?