After a night of heavy rain, the
trenches were waterlogged and to dig as planned would have risked damaging the
work we'd already done, and losing volunteers in the mud bath.
Everybody (our 5 hardy
volunteers) sheltered in their cars while we put our contingency plans into
action. Things started to look up as none of the volunteers got lost in convoy
to the NAA offices in Barnard Castle.
Our volunteers then had a welcome
talk from Lynne Gardiner, the Senior Project Officer in Paleoecology, who explained
how this part of the process works and what we can learn from sampling trench
material. The volunteers then had the opportunity to get their hands dirty,
sheltered from the rain. Dani and Hannah from NAA split the group into two. One
group donned rubber gloves and washed some sediment samples in preparation for
sorting, while the others got stuck into cataloguing the weight and volume of
some samples, sieving them and sorting them.
The group had a lunch time talk
from Damien Ronan, the Project Manager in CAD, about the LiDAR and geophysics
imaging which was used to investigate the site initially. Dr. Hannah Russ,
Post-Excavations Manager, then gave a presentation on infant bones and animal
bones, demonstrating identification techniques with examples of infant tiger,
goat and pig bones from her own collection, as well as adult bones from cats,
fish and other animals!
Despite the rain, we hope this
was an interesting and enjoyable day for the volunteers! The weather is
forecast to improve for tomorrow, so we hope to be back on site. Martyn plans
to give a quick demonstration of the geophysics equipment in the morning, while
we wait for the trenches to dry out a bit!
New volunteers always welcome -
starting 9.30am as usual on site tomorrow.
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