The end of our first week has come around very quickly – Monday seems an age away! The team has been powering through the features in both trenches, and our record folders are steadily being populated with dusty context sheets and plan drawings. Georgia and Danni’s Iron Age ditch was also the first to be photographed. Johanna had to douse her feature/pit with water just to make it out in the baked clay – it was full of charcoal but sadly no artefacts.

Ski dropped by this morning to metal-detect the spoil heaps and found a couple of pieces of pottery and a piece of lead. James brought out his new toy a Bartington MS3 magnetic susceptibility meter and with Cubby’s help measured the magnetic susceptibility of the soil in and around the features on the south side of Trench C. We hope this technique will help us to identify features in the very dry subsoil.

The big discovery of the day was made by Lucy and Andy – our biggest sherd of Iron Age pottery so far. Hopefully there’ll be lots more where that comes from.

Lucy finds a big sherd of Iron Age pottery © The Lufton Project

All in all we’ve had a very successful week and morale is very high – looking forward to the barbeque tonight though!

SSARG volunteers Peter, Pete and Graham enjoying some hard labout © The Lufton Project