Rhynie, Aberdeenshire

Rhynie, Aberdeenshire
The Craw Stane with Tap o'Noth hillfort in the background (Photo courtesy of Cathy MacIver).

Thursday 21 June 2012

Classic postholes!

It was a very productive day today although the rain hit us at about 4pm.  We have the whole site planned and have done several careful cleanings, which has really helped us see the archaeology.
Even though this could be the coldest midsummer day in living memory, the weather was actually pretty great for digging and seeing features.
Peter hard at work excavating the post from his posthole.  You can also just see a red sandy line running through the trench, which is probably the remains of a beam from an early medieval buidling.

Not only have we planned, but feature digging has also begun.  A few postholes have been started in what we think is one of the buildings.  These are classic types with a burnt post, stone packing material on either side to help it stand up set in a narrow steep sided pit.  We've also started looking into a pit that might be connected to a building, too.

We're hoping the rain holds off or at least is not so bad that it ruins our fine trowelling work done today.  Tomorrow we are also expecting about 20 students from Rhynie Primary School to visit site - and hopefully we can put them to work sieving Gary's spoil from his investigation of the inner ditch. 

The 'dig house' is relatively quiet tonight, perhaps in part to the 'digger's cold' doing the rounds.  It was 'Mexican Night' which involved chicken fajitas with all the trimmings.  People seemed happy (I'm a vegetarian so I opted out!) and they haven't even busted out the dessert yet so they must have had enough to eat.  Probably the most difficult part of running this dig is feeding 20 people! Although Oskar has helped out by providing some delicious (?!?) dried fish from Iceland....


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