Voussoirs galore! Day three

Sorry for the sudden silence after day two, but I have determined that the Blogger iPhone app has its problems, and the issue also extends to another Blogspot app, BlogGo. I had tested both of them quite a bit before leaving for the UK and initially had no problems here either, but as of Wednesday evening the posts I wrote would never publish, even ones with only a few words and no pictures. The built-in browser interface seems to work though.

Having lost the original day three post, here's what I can piece together on Friday morning, while I wait for it to be time to get up.

No time lost to rain, began to make quicker progress as I got more confident. Andy and Justin are confident we are still in largely unstratified material, so they are encouraging a more aggressive use of spades rather than gentle trowel scraping. A feature of the day for me was finding three more voussoir stones in the floor, at the northern edge of our trench; the builders of this 4/5th C building probably stole these from one of the bathhouses, possibly the main one in the vicus. Voussoir stones are specially cut to help form arches; the examples here are characterized by having a very flat surface and neatly carved "ears" at one end that (if I understood Justin Blake correctly) supported the ends of wooden beams that formed the bathhouse roof. Here's a shot of the first additional one I found:

And within an hour it became clear there were two more adjacent to it, with four of them (the first was discovered a few weeks ago) forming a sideways L-shape:

Sean and I both found plenty of crusted/rusted Roman nails/hobnails from sandals as well as many pottery sherds, including this nice rim that Sean unearthed:

I also managed to record a couple of "small finds" in the last hour of the day - these are more unusual/special items that get their own bag and their find location is recorded in 3D space, using a digital level. Nothing too spectacular, but unfortunately I can't describe them here.

Finally, here's a shot of our little piece of the trench at the end of the day: