It is funny how almost every day in the field you work as much as you can and seem to progress but then at the end of the week, or even worse at the end of the season you are being asked “that is all you have done? not much of a progress!”

To all who are thinking or asking that question it is difficult to explain the difficulty of the field work, the amount of the materials that are collected and the amount of the dirt that has been moved around – literally!

Field work is not a quick expedition. There are so many things that take time and require a slow pace. It is very important to be precise both with the place of the excavation (the position of the field) and the depth of the dig. The measuring tape is just one of the many tools required because the area that is being excavated is not a perfectly flat surface. You must think in three dimensions all the time and clear the layers in your mind before clearing the dirt from the ground.

Once you have removed a rock, a stone, or anything else it has been removed! That is why the progress is “slow” to some standards. All the rocks have to be articulated. That means you have to dig carefully around them to see if they are connected to any other next or below them otherwise you might loose a part of the wall, or a doorway, or something similar.

This season we also decided to invest even more time in collecting soil samples for flotation. Sometimes it is very obvious that there is a change of colour in the soil. The fragments of ash can be seen clearly. But only after the floatation you can have a clearer picture of the type of the remains. I will write more about the flotation in a separate post.

The best way to describe the progress is to show it: