2008 Dig Diary
Week beginning 13th July
We
started the week working on the stones of the
hovel
as that is a good place to learn how to use a trowel properly. It was a
lovely hot day so we also got on with some wet sieving of the pit
contents so John and Miranda and Holly and Joe did that for most of the
morning. When we get another wet day we can sift through the wet sieved
material as we did the other week. On Monday we took another slice of
the trench off on the area near the feather pits and came up with
another section of the Mesolithic clay platform. It was not as smooth as
the areas we have excavated before so we have to be more careful when
excavating and only use the small leaf trowels.
The weather became very misty and drizzly the next day so we returned to the Hovel area because it is so much more sheltered there. We discovered (yes you guessed it!) more stones but some really nice big ones this time. Bowen one of our students found lots of notched stones and my cat Indie found him a comfortable cushion while he worked. We do not know what these notches were made for but they are undeniable man made.
The weather was better on Wednesday so we carried on digging in the hovel and I taught the new students how to do some planning.
We went back to the Mesolithic platform on Thursday and continued excavating the clay platform. It was still very bumpy in places and it appeared in others that the floor had eroded and had been patched up with more clay. When we fully excavate this area we will be able to see if this was the case because the floors at the edge of the walls would be smoother than the floor in the middle.
I continued to clean out the silt build up and found another pit previously thought to be empty pit 23 had a feather lining and the typical pile of gravel on the side of it.
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week beginning 6th July
The
weather was really terrible this week so we spent a
lot of time indoors pot washing, sorting previously washed pots and
writing the contexts on the terracotta finds. We also had an opportunity
to catch up on our stone washing! We do find clearly worked stone tools
on site but to the untrained eye when excavating they just look like
stones. So we tell our student to put anything remotely interesting in
the trays. Hence when it comes to pot washing people understandably
prefer to wash interesting pots rather than what looks like and very
often turns out to be quartz gravel. But it needs to be done because
only when you wash the dirt off the stones can you tell if they have
been used as a tool or not.
It was so wet this week that we really caught up on a backlog of pot washing so I went into some old archive boxes in the store and found a few bags of the dried wet sieved contents of the votive pool on site and pit 9 (the one with the eggs and magpie bodies in them). We did the votive pool first and it is painstaking work flicking just a few grains at a time to see if there is anything interesting in it. I was amazed when Holly found another pin and two finger nail pairings. We only have 6 pins from the pool to date and two finger nail pairings so that was a great find. John and Jo then found a cherry stone and some hazel nut shells too. So a rewarding day!
In between the showers on the next day we worked on the stones in the Hovel, but then the rain set in and we decided to retreat indoors again. We still had some more wet sieved bags to sort through so the students got stuck in with hot cups of tea and hot chocolate at their sides. John then found what appeared to be a few scraps of newspaper of some sort in the contents of pit 9! They were very small fragments of paper and after soaking them overnight we started the careful work of prizing them apart to see if we could make out any words from the text. I got the digital microscope out and we spent a really enjoyable day finding odd words and looking at them on my laptop. You really had to be there to feel the excitement when we found the word ‘gangs’ or ‘4ft’ or ‘Fox’, ‘fate’ and so on! Anyone looking in on us would have thought we had gone mad, but it really was exciting. There were parts of drawings of a ladies cuff off a dress and the tantalizing date 19.10. Which helps us to know that it might have been a paper from around the 19th October. We think it might have been a bit of a penny dreadful with adverts in it. We are getting a book on typesets of early printers next week so that might help us with a date. However by the end of July we should have a AMS date for this pit anyway. But if the newspaper was early Victorian then we have over 200 years between two of our pits which would be really exciting if that was the case.
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week beginning 29th June
We
started the week clearing some vegetation from the area a
bove
the Mesolithic platform so we can extend the trench more easily. We took
another slice of the baulk off and found some nice pieces of flint when
we reached the floor. Clint who has been with us for four weeks finally
found two pieces of flint himself on his last day which he was delighted
with.
While the students were in that area, I spent my time clearing off the creeping mosses that would cover the clay platform every year if I did not keep it in check. I decided to clear the build up of sediment that had formed over the last few winters from some of the pits. When I did this in pit 14 (which we believed had been emptied in antiquity ) I found that Marie who excavated the original feature had not gone down deep enough and I found another intact feather pit! It was different from other pits as it had a bowl shaped depression in it lined with iron stained white feathers and the feather lid to the pit was still hanging off the side of the pit. On the other side of the pit was the impression of a small egg but there was no egg membrane. Next to this on the south east side of the pit was a clearly placed piece of white quartz shaped like a leaf pointing north west. The pit itself was east / west aligned. Lizzie and Emma wet sieved the contents of the pit and found a decomposed egg membrane so there had been an egg sitting in the depression. It is odd as the other two pits with eggs in them 9 and 36 have lots of eggs in them. Also in the wet sieved slops from the pit was a small pile of soft brown fur maybe that had been the contents of the feather lined bowl in the pit? Who knows what was going on in the minds of the people making the pits, one thing for sure with 43 pits to date it was a well established belief system for someone.
Next week while we are digging in that area I am going to take another look at the rest of the pits to see if they have been excavated fully or not.
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week starting 22nd June
We began the week by
going back to Oak to remove th-Supervisor-Mathew-and-h.jpg)
e
topsoil from the new trenches we had started at Easter. We excavated to
a red subsoil with flecks of charcoal in it and clusters of stones.
After planning these features we are going to take the subsoil off and
see if it is in fact natural or re-deposited natural. We have aerial
photography and geophysics in the field behind this trench that
indicates a roundhouse settlement. This field is extremely flat for this
landscape, so it is possible an area was levelled to accommodate this
settlement. If this is the case the trench could well have re deposited
subsoil in that might have preserved the archaeology beneath it. We
will have to wait till next week to see if this is the case.
Midweek Clint and Bart taught the rest of the group how to do a section drawing.
We spent most of the rest of the week widening the trench on the Mesolithic platform. Another possible dwelling was revealed with a ditch on the side of it which could have been a drip gully. Unfortunately we could not extend this trench further without moving a huge pile of spoil from our original 2001 excavation. Mathew Westaby was team leader for this activity and really motivated the group with his witty banter. So that they appeared to have enjoyed spending a day with mattocks and shovels moving away a few tons of topsoil. But I bet they slept well that night though!
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week starting 15th June
Well the weather was
still good so we took another slice
of
the trench near the feather pits and revealed yet more of the Mesolithic
clay platform. The next day it was so hot two students Clint from the
USA and Bart from Nottingham university wet sieved the contents of pit
43 that I excavated last week. The weather took a turn for the worst so
we went indoors the next day to do some post excavation work. The first
thing they all did was to flick through the dried wet sieved pit
contents and found some tiny bones as yet unidentified. Here is a
picture of the golden fur and the organic layer between it where we
found the tooth. Also there is a picture of the claws from the dog/ wolf
pit and one of the cat claws from pit 36 so you can see how big they
are.
The rain really set in so the students sorted some previously washed finds from other trenches, then labelled all the terracotta pieces and did some pot washing themselves. We never quite catch up with the pot washing during the season, so it is left to the local team sometimes to come in out of season to do it.
We also spent a day this week in the Hovel taking the shillet off the stones which is something that is very popular with the students surprisingly enough. It is just that there appears to be nothing there then these wonderfully faced granite stones appear and as you follow them they always reveal more. This week they found the biggest stone we have excavated to date.
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week starting 8th June
Well it was a beautiful day on Sunday not a cloud in the sky. Which
meant I had to keep checking that the students drank enough water and
put sun block on!
We went back to the area we call Oak on that day where most of the Mesolithic flint has been found in the past. This area is on a reasonably flat bank overlooking what would have been a shallow lake in the Mesolithic and ideal place to situate a hunting camp. We opened up two new trenches there at Easter but when the snow came with the north wind it was just to exposed to dig. All the soil in this area has to be sieved as it is very easy to miss flint flakes, but we only found one piece of flint all day. We are not down deep enough to be at any habitation layer yet so it is not surprising really.
We moved over on Monday to the area where the feather pits are found because when I have students that are just coming to us for one week I like to get them to dig in all the areas of the site. We found another pit and I excavated it on Tuesday. We had a reporter and photographer from a Magazine like National Geographic in Germany with us for two days to do a feature on Saveock in the travel edition of their journal. The majority of the pits had been emptied in antiquity and you just can’t tell if it has its full contents until you dig it. So it was really surprising to find it was yet another type of pit when I excavated it. This one was lined with a golden coloured hair. The pit seemed to have been made up of layers of some organic matter ( possibly leaves) with the fur and on the organic matter we have found 3 teeth. They are molars but we are not sure from what animal as yet. We are going to wet sieve the rest of the slops from the pit this week so we might find something else in that.
As the weather was so hot we did our annual pool cleaning. We need a lot of helpers to empty the pool as the drain that comes out of it is just for overflow water. It is now crystal clear again.
We are going to take some more off the area where the pits are and the Mesolithic floors this week if it stays dry so I will let you know what we find next weekend.
Jacqui
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2008 Dig Diary
Week starting 1st June
Well the weather is
certainly an improvement to
the
Easter snow. We spent the first part of the week continuing to dig a
trench we started at the end of 2006 under a medieval hedge. This area
is between the stones under the hovel (picture in last dig diary) and an
area we call apple. We wanted to find out if the stone feature in hovel
continued under the old hedge and found that it did. It appeared that
there was some remains of a robbed out stone floor on the apple side of
the trench which we are going to investigate more this coming Sunday.
Here is a picture of our diggers enjoying the shade of the apple tree as
the sun was very fierce that day and here also is a picture of Cathy
from St. Mary’s in Canada learning how to plan.
We also cleared another area down where the feather pits are on the main site. Since my last dig diary I excavated a pit that was only partly excavated last season due to the wet weather. Yet again Saveock has shocked us with its macabre pits. If the cat pit was not unusual enough we now have a dog or wolf pit! The pit was north south aligned and more than 90 cm long which is much longer than the other pits found to date. This pit however was also lined with black fur with the skin side down, but on top of it was the complete body of either a dog or wolf. We thought it might be wolf due to the ridge on the top of the skull, but we have sent pictures to the expert at the local zoo and are waiting for his reply. It had its paws tucked under its chin and its body was curled round and placed on top of the fur lining. Many of us have buried our faithful pets in our back gardens, but I doubt we would even contemplate skinning it and placing its carcass on top of its own fur. We now have 45 pits and I cannot image what we will find in the next one! Here are some picture of it and the top of the skull. We have some funding for a few radio carbon dates now so we are going to send off to Florida some of the fur of this animal, the cat fur and some of the feathers in the egg and magpie pit. When the dates come back we will get an idea how long a time span there was between these ritual deposits. I say ritual deposits quite safely now as I cannot think of any practical reason for the last two animal pits. At the end of the week we found the top of another pit near the cat pit. I will excavate that next week and let you know what we find.
Jacqui
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6th April 2008
After all the excitement of the cat pit last week we were brought
down to earth by the terribly cold weather. The students valiantly kept digging while it snowed, but eventually we had to abandon the area where the feather and now cat pit is, because the clay floors became too soft to walk on. So while the hail and snow did its worst outside we spent a warm and cosy day drinking hot chocolate and processing finds from last season in the workroom. The forecast for the rest of the week was terrible, but then Cornwall rarely does what the TV weather programme says it is going to do.
So we have had a glorious three days digging in a south facing area we call Hovel. We call it that because in the 19th century it appears to have been a semi detached one up one down mill workers cottages. The strange thing about Hovel is what we found underneath the primitive lime ash floor of the old building. We started digging this area in 2002 when we found under the floor a shale or decomposed slate layer, which you might think is not out of the ordinary in Cornish geology. But we found that the shale layer had been purposely put there to cover a huge pile of large faced granite stones. Really good stones, far too good to make into a house foundation as they would be enough to build a rather large house themselves. Over the years we must have taken over 30 tons of this shale layer off the granite stones and apart from one piece of flint and numerous strange notched granite and quartz stones nothing else! So the tentative conclusion is that the structure is early prehistoric of unknown origin.
So we have been happily taking off this layer of shale off the stones and extending the trench to see how extensive it is. Well the trench is now quite big (see picture above) and we don’t appear to have got to the edge of it yet.
The wonderful thing about our dig is we don’t need to worry about the time or years it might take us to dig as the archaeology is not going anywhere and neither are we. We are not digging now till the first of June at the end of that week I will let you know what we have found.
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30th March 2008
Well we have just finished the first week of our dig season and as usual 
Saveock has not disappointed us! The main part of the week we were removing the topsoil from the trenches in an area we call Oak (because it is surrounded by Oak trees).
In this field on previous occasions when field walking, we have found lots of Mesolithic flint, so this season we are going to investigate it in more detail to see if we can find any flint working floors. The middle of the week was taken up by teaching the students planning and section drawing. On the last day I thought we would dig in the area we found the feather pits, as two of the students were only with us for a week, so I thought that might be more interesting for them. As usual it is the last day for some that the most interesting finds are discovered as it is with Time Team. We found two pits in the clay platform one small and one quite big both were north/south aligned. I excavated the small one and found it to have been emptied apart from the base of it which had a large spread of the tiny beach stones we have found on the other pits. This was unusual because we only unusually find a small pile of them in each pit.
The other pit Stella, one of our regular team excavated and as she took the top off she called me over to say she had found an egg with a baby chick in it.
I don’t know why but as we have only found one pit in the 35 pits we have excavated with eggs in it I thought it was going to be the only one like that.
So I was really surprised to find a rectangular pit with eggs in it too, as the other pit that had eggs in was round. But that was not the most surprising thing we found. A spring started filling the pit as Stella excavated it so we saved all the muddy slops so we could wet sieve it. You have to always do that when it is very muddy as it is very easy to miss something otherwise.
Then we found what we thought were black bird feathers, but as it was so wet is was difficult to identify them at first. But it was the end of the day so we covered the pit up for the weekend. Today I wet sieved the slops and found claws and teeth, but not bird claws and teeth, cat claws and teeth! My own cat was happy to oblige with identification of the claw and the back bottom teeth so there was no doubt about it. I then went back to the pit and cleaned it up and found that it was not black feathers that covered half of it, it was black fur! Now you are probably thinking well people do bury their cats in their gardens, but they don’t bury them with eggs with baby chick in them in a north south aligned rectangular pit.
We are going into this area next week weather permitting so I can’t imagine what we will find if there are more pits there, but I will let you know.
Jacqui
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