Bead-tastic!

This is the rare white glass bead found by Leona Bruce during our schools activities today. It is a tiny glass bead that dates to the Iron Age or early medieval period (c.500 BC to AD 700). What a fantastic find and well done to Leona and her eagle eyes!! It may have been part of a necklace worn by a Rhynie ancestor.

School visits

 

Well isn't this the cutest thing ever! Little Rhynie folks coming to visit the excavation! The whole Rhynie Primary school and Nursery came to visit accompanied by headteacher Claire Connnor and other lovely teachers. The kids were aged 3-11 and took part in trowelling, sieving for artefacts and washing of finds. We sent them home with a find of their own (some of our lovely modern pottery) in their very own finds bag. All of the kids were fantastic and there was some great trowelling action, sieving and washing in evidence. We may see university applications for archaeology rocket in about 6-15 years from now...

 

Leona even found us a very rare white glass bead during sieving....

Lovely Ditches

And talking of Square Enclosures - here is a section dug across the ditch of the smaller square enclosure as dug by Dave Anderson (thanks Dave!!)- you can see the lenses of orangey-brown sand silting into the ditch towards the base  - this seems to represent the gradual silting of the ditch during use of the enclosure. Above is a much more homogenous brown sand deposit that seems to represent the more rapid or deliberate in-filling of the ditch once the enclosure was no longer used or maintained. Thankfully there was some charcoal-gold at the base of the ditch which should help us date the enclosure ditch infilling.

New kite shot of large square enclosure

Before your eyeballs you can see our latest kite shot of the larger square enclosure courtesy of Oskar's magic kite-cam. In the NW part of the enclosure entrance you can see a group of features that may be part of an Iron Age ring-ditch roundhouse. We are not sure yet whether this is contemporary with the square enclosure - we haven't found any artefacts in the features associated with the ring-ditch yet, but we have charcoal from one feature that should provide a radiocarbon date.

Ring-ditch houses is a name given to a particular type of prehistoric roundhouse that has large erosion gullies, probably created from the stalling of animals within the house. Only the foundations of these structures tend to survive and our example consists of postholes, the ring-ditch and a large central pit full of burnt stone, ash and fire-cracked stone. Hopefully more will come out in the post-excavation and radiocarbon dating to tell us whether this structure is contemporary or earlier (or indeed later) than the square enclosure itself.

Science is real!!!

Science in action!! Petar Davidkov piloting forensic archaeology techniques for detecting graves. I'd like to tell you more but the science makes my brain hurt. He is using a magnetic susceptibility meter...

Digging into Features

Our work exploring the many features on site continues.  We're doing really well and have been helped by a small but dedicated group of volunteers (today alone we had Sheila - our queen of sieving - helped out by Tony, Ron & Juliet in the big enclosure ditch, Alastair in a scoop, Dave in the small enclosure ditch, Diane in a smaller barrow ditch and Fred in a something we can't quite identify yet!

That's in addition to our team of star Aberdeen diggers, too.  The day was largely dry but overcast, which meant we could see features and fills much better - and now there is a nice soft rain that will hopefully make the features pop out at us tomorrow.  Hopefully it won't be too wet into the day tomorrow, though, as we've got the WHOLE of Rhynie Primary visiting us for their 'day at the dig' - we will definitely be a busy site tomorrow!  At least we'll have lots of (little) hands to help us trowel, sieve and clean up some of our finds.

We've managed to complete a slot each across our two square enclosures.  Neither are particularly deep and they have not had much in them in terms of finds, but both had charcoal, which is hopefully going to provide us with some dates.  Both ditches are quite similar, which adds to the impression that the two enclosures are contemporary. 

The small square enclosure ditch.

A mysterious feature (kind of an amorphous blob...) in the middle of the smaller square enclosure has been investigated, too.  Although we still aren't sure what it is, we have found a large chunk of burnt wood in it.  It looks like a bit of a burnt branch.  We've lifted this whole and will take it back to the lab so our scientists can identify what type of tree it came from and take a sample for radiocarbon dating.

The burnt branch found today.

The Rhynie lurgy seems to have made a reappearance this year (it swept through the digging team last year!).  I've fallen prey and Gordon has a 'tickle' in his throat.  Perhaps a medicinal whisky is in order... just for health purposes, obviously!

It's the Pits (in a good way)!

Another very busy day on site, with lots of visitors coming up to see us.  The Pictish café seems to be doing very well, too - I finally managed to sneak down to sample one of the infamous cinnamon buns (ok... two cinnamon buns...) at lunchtime.  I'm just hoping Debbie has a small Rhynie Man T-shirt left for me (although with all those cakes, maybe I should go up a size just in case!).

Today we've been really getting into the different features on site with all the archaeology students and a few of our most loyal volunteers excavating a range of pits, possible post-settings and ditch sections.  One of our most interesting features is Emma's pit - this pit was absolutely black with charcoal and burnt material.  Definitely not a problem to find dating evidence for this feature! We are not sure what it was used for.  Emma did find a little bit of slag, but it does not appear to be a dump from metalworking and it might even be burning done inside the pit itself.  Nearby, Rachel has been working on a rather odd feature; we thought it was going to be a hollow filled with modern material, but then underneath a perfect little post-hole appeared!

Emma's pit of charcoal!

Rachel working on her feature - dressed for Scottish summer.

Our volunteers in the 'trowel line' made great progress, too.  We've now cleaned most of the site and we've even been able to go back over some areas of the small enclosure to refresh our features and see if we can find any more.  There was a suggestion that we had a line of post-holes just inside the ditch, so we've been trying to see if they are 'real'.  We (well, Fred) also found a sherd of what looks like a piece of the mid-section of a very fine glass vessel.  The glass is so fine and paper thin that we have hopes it might date to the Pictish period - we'll ask our finds expert Ewan for advice tomorrow! This adds to our growing list of interesting finds that we can't quite date!  A few days ago another volunteer, Jamie, found a delicate copper alloy buckle.
 

Copper Alloy buckle found during cleaning.

 

We can't believe it is our second week already - time flies. Now to check the weather and hope for some gentle rain overnight and a little less breeze tomorrow.  Gordon needs to do a bit of a rain dance for Mr Munch I think.