Today was the end of the first week of excavation at Lufton Roman Villa.

The team struggled with the heat today, but despite the weather they managed to be incredibly productive throughout the whole day.

The team was also joined on site today by Sue from SSARG.

Andy spent the day surveying the trench using the GPS and Total Station equipment (below) to set up the site grid.

James G spent most of the day directing the action and trying to wrestle with all of the exposed contexts, he did find tie to start recording the building (below).

Elliot led James I, Henry and Sue in exploring some difficult archaeology in the North-Eastern Corner of the trench. This mainly seems to be backfill from Hayward’s excavation overlying earlier Roman deposits.

Meanwhile, Hayley was in charge of Dan and Kevin as they searched the South-Eastern corner for the villa’s corn dryer. We didn’t find the corn dryer (the trench may just be a little too far north) but did determine the edges of some of the trenches from the earlier excavation.

Situated between those two teams, Holly-Ann directed Charlotte and Chris in attempting to resolve the stratigraphy of the newly christened wall 111. They added about 4m of length to the wall by removing the fill of a robber cut (identified yesterday) to expose the wall’s lower courses. An important discovery was what is almost certainly the line of the waterpipe discovered in the earlier excavation. This is further evidence that the trench has been located in the right place to answer our questions.

Although the day yielded little in way of finds, at the end of the day the entire team was proud of how much work they had achieved across their first week.

We returned to camp to enjoy cheesy pasta prepared by Imogen and Antonia.

Everyone is looking forward to a day off tomorrow that should hopefully start with a nice lie in!