Bottom reached; Day seven

Another warm day, but just enough breeze to keep us from getting too hot. It was warm enough, however, to see the ice cream window open for business, just in time for tea break.

A fairly quiet day, no major finds, but lots of earth moved. I finished bottoming out my slice of the trench to the level just below the robber rubble, and then moved over to help Sean do the same in his. Just before tea break Kate had Sean move into Claire's trench, who was suffering in the heat and left to do some pot washing. While he mattocked away, at a level only just beginning to reach the rubble, I worked on final clear out of Sean's side of our trench. As we hit 4:15 and final clean up time I had the satisfaction of finishing the last of the open area; three larger stones that we had been leaving as possibly undisturbed will have to come out first thing tomorrow. Here's how it ended, with the three stones marked with white arrows:

The yellow arrowed stones at the far eastern edge of my trench seemed to mark the beginning of an unrobbed wall, but when Erin cleared more overburden away it became clear they are probably nothing. The eastern edge of the robbed area remains uncertain; but Erin is seeing some rubble, although not to the same depth Sean and I had. However, the red arrowhead stone is much deeper and may turn out to be something...

Some of the group spent the afternoon on pot-washing duty; Sean and I will start the day there. Forecast is for cooler weather, which will be a welcome relief from the heat of the last two days.

A small group has been assigned to the first robber trench, and are seeing some good floor flagstones, but in some places the robbing appears to have removed them:

Finally, it's Tuesday evening, which means Quiz Night at the Twice Brewed Inn! Lets see if a Vindolanda diggers team can take the prize...

Robber bottom? Day six

A thick fog greeted my eyes when I opened the curtains at six, visibility down to no more than 75 yards. One of the swallows nesting in the eaves above my window, perched in its usual spot on the phone wire, didn't seem to care:

However, by around 10:30 the sun had completely burned the fog away, leaving us with the hottest digging day yet, probably close to 25C, 80F, with only a slight breeze to cool us down. Sean and I attacked the pile of robber-reject rubble with mattocks, hoping to reach the southern end of the trench by lunchtime. We didn't quite make it, but reached our goal shortly after the resumption. We both still had rubble below us, so Kate and Justin had us move back to the likely northern limit of the robber trench and push lower, hopefully into the last undisturbed level beneath the rubble. A mattock proved to be extremely handy in shifting the packed rock. Finds kept coming, Sean found a really nice fragment of a glass object, with some decoration around where a handle was once attached:

I found a more solid rubble-free level fairly quickly and by the end of the day had about 80% of my slice down to that point. It was too late in the day for any of the supervisors to check my hunch that I'm finally beneath the robber's work, hopefully they'll agree with me tomorrow.

It's now clear that the robber trench extends across about half the width of the trench; the edges haven't been clearly defined yet, but I estimate it at roughly 15 yards wide, which would make it even bigger than the robber trench found earlier this season. My amateur eye thinks I may have the eastern boundary in my slice, but Erin in the next more easterly part may prove me wrong.

Here's a sampling of the days winnings, a fairly large fragment of Samian ware (top left, thin orangey-red with a distinctive shiny glaze), a piece of sheep/pig (?) bone, a nail and Sean's piece of glass on top of a piece of tile:

Our bit of the trench looks a lot different than it did this morning:

And here's a view of Mark, Graham and Justin's work at the eastern end, uncovering what I think is indeed the intervallum road:

Even warmer weather is forecast for tomorrow, hopefully the day will see the end of the robber trench in my section.

Trials of a mobile blogger

The past several days have been a harsh lesson in the difficulties of blogging with poor internet access. I'm relying solely on my iPhone 4S to write the blog, in an area without 3G coverage. Mobile apps for blogs hosted on Google's Blogger exist, but as I've already mentioned, Google's own Blogger app is very unreliable, and 3rd party apps using the Blogger API are equally affected. So, I've ended up having to rely on the web browser to make/edit new posts. This works fine for the text, but adding pictures is another story altogether.

I spent four hours yesterday morning solving the puzzle, and in case anyone else should find themselves in the same boat, this is what I found. The browser editor gives you four options for uploading images:

1. Pre-existing images from the blog itself
2. From Picasa Web albums
3. From your phone
4. From a URL

Pre-existing images are no use to me, because I want to add new ones. When you click on the Picasa Web Albums options, it doesn't seem to recognize any albums that I can upload to very easily. The "From your phone" option sounds like the one to use, but it depends on using Google+, which I downloaded, but it requires Auto upload of all pictures taken on the camera; this is impossible when every image is 6 MP and the network is going at worse than a 56k modem. The URL option seemed simple enough, until I found that neither DropBox or Flickr now allow direct access to images via an URL. Photobucket does, but the mobile app is literally broken, does not work at all - I tried it even though more than 80% of the 159 reviews are 1 star on the App Store! I have a Wuala account, but after getting the mobile app for it I found that it only works for downloading content you've already put there; new content can't be added from a phone.

To cut a long story short his is what eventually worked, using the "From a URL" option:

1. Open photos in Photogene2, edit as needed (fantastic app by the way, can do some quite sophisticated adjustments, like increasing shadow exposure, color balance etc, as well as all the standard cropping, rotation, text, arrows), export reduced size images into Picasa.
2. In Picasa Web Albums mobile app ($6), select image, copy URL
3. Paste URL into blogger's browser interface

Even this solution is clunky at best, because the browser has a limited display of the editor window; if you load more than two images it won't scroll all the way down. I had to put all the text in and then gradually add the images from the bottom up, so I could continue to see and place images higher up the window.

Come on Google, get your act together and make the mobile Blogger app work as its supposed to!

Robber Trench II - Day five

Like an unwanted sequel to a bad movie, Friday saw the arrival of an unwelcome archaeological development on any excavation: a "robber trench". An unusually large one was discovered in the trench in late May, but it was depressing to discover another one. Robber trenches can result from the thieves seeking many different prizes, but in both cases here it looks like it was the stone they were after: all the larger ones useable for building are missing. Its hard to say when the robbing took place (pre 1850 anyway, when ploughing stopped and the site was finally receiving some protection), but the walls of one of the several farmhouses near the fort is very likely to be where the stolen goods ended up. However, the thieves were apparently only interested in the stone, because all the various kinds of Roman artefacts typical of Vindolanda remained in the mixture of soil and rubble of robber trench 1, and the same seems to be true of the new one. We're hoping they have simply removed a back wall of our building and not the floor, which may hold the best dating evidence for the structure.

Some time during the morning Sean was cleaning around a decent-sized but very thin piece of stone when he found there was a hole beneath it, not the hard-packed orangish-brown soil we had been seeing all week. Andy came to take a look and was instantly crestfallen, seeing the telltale signs of recently disturbed loose material that indicate the presence of a robber trench. At that time I had been working at the far eastern edge of my zone, but as soon as I moved westward a little way the same rubble/brown soil mixture became very apparent. It appears at the moment that the eastern edge of the robbing may be in my zone, the western edge perhaps ten yards away. With hindsight I had just stopped short of hitting the northern edge of it myself on day four, and the southern end of it may well still be hidden under the grass, judging by the similar rubbly appearance of the surface that runs right to the edge of the trench. Here's a shot of what we're hoping is the eastern edge of the robber trench (yellow arrow), and roughly the northern edge (blue arrows), southern edge of the trench visible at the top of the image:

Confirming that there are still finds to be made, here's a good example of a nail and Sean holding the "staff of recognition" while his first small find of the week is being logged (unfortunately in the category I can't describe):

I also pulled a broken piece of roof tile (stone) out of the robber trench rubble; a complete one might have been kept/recorded, but Justin asked to keep it to use for one of his many daily talks to visitors. I caught his arm in the shot while he described a different style of roof tile (lower, lighter coloured) without the hole mine had:

Day four

We had drizzly rain on and off all day, only becoming dry in late afternoon. A heavier spell of drenching rain came at 10:30, leading to a retreat to the tea hut and a decision being made to take an early lunch and restart at noon. In the end we only lost half an hour of digging overall, by putting in a long post-lunch session from noon to 2:30.

It was largely uneventful day, with the trench looking more and more rocky everywhere, but with few easily-determined features appearing. One exception was the linear jumble of rock at the western end, which continues to look like a collapsed wall, and the massive stones at the eastern end seem as if they might be part of the intervallum road (although seem slightly out of alignment for that). Here's a view of the eastern end and the massive stones there; if you look carefully you can also see two large fragments of a pot lying trapped in beneath some smaller rocks in the foreground:

Remarkably few finds of note anywhere in the trench, although I did get another small find that is not earth shattering but can't be described in detail, suffice it to say that it was not even exciting enough for me to photograph...! I'm now about 70% of the way back to the southern edge of my slice, hoping to get close to completing it tomorrow. The Canadian students spent the day picking through sticky black mud in the vicus trench, hauled up to grass level spade by spade by supervisors Alex and Kate; the slightly sulfurous smell of the anaerobic soil wafted up and across the path downwind.

Here's a view of my slice standing at the southern end of the trench, beginning to reveal a jumble of stones (foreground) rather than the back wall that Andy and Justin were hoping/expecting to find:

Forecast tomorrow is for clear skies all day and warmer, lets hope it's more accurate than today.