We face many challenges on each of our excavations and the last dig of the year was no exception. Excavating a Roman site within a wood can be hard, painstaking work - but also fascinating. Immediately a cornucopia of ideas spring to mind - do we have enough gardening tools to cope with roots and branches? What will the preservation of the ar-chaeology be, and has it managed to survive the effects of planting great swathes of trees?
After three days of trying to navigate the wood -yes I managed to get lost, fall down giant track ridges and trip over roots - we managed to find out more about the site than I thought we would! Phil's main trench proved that not only was the preservation of archaeology exceptional but that there were substantial Roman buildings on site.
Matt's trench proved to be one of those unsuspected gems. Uncovering a demolished high status building can be exciting work and I really hadn't expected to find quite so much elaborate painted plaster work. The demolition layer was vast and would have taken us days to unravel if we'd dug the whole building. It is one of those trenches you begrudg-ingly leave after three days wishing you had three months... What else could we have uncovered? How big would the building be and has anything survived in-situ?
We had some very special visitors on this dig from the Young Archaeologists' Club (YAC). Time Team work very closely with YAC and support the work they do to encourage young people to participate in archaeology. In 2009 they ran the celebration challenge; a big na-tionwide competition to show how much YAC members and other young people enjoy Time Team. It was fantastic to meet the competition winners who spent a day with us on this shoot.
Their challenge had been to design a series of gifts for the Team. Hannah Talbot from Yorkshire made us a huge trench-shaped cake with Phil, Mick and Tony figures! It went down very well at tea time and was snaffled very quickly indeed - dare I say mainly by our pesky camera crews! Mick received a splendid jumper designed by Olivia Morris-Soper and the whole Team was presented with an amazing banner created by the Newcastle YAC branch. We would like to thank all of the YAC members who entered for their hard work and also for their long support. Hopefully, I may have the pleasure of working with some of them in the future!
For further details on the Young Archaeologists' Club and how to join visit yac-uk.org.
