“Shovelling earth for all that we were worth …”
In the second week of this year’s excavations at Devereux’s Pit the hard work of removing backfill and preparing the ground is complete and excavation is now underway. The sounds of the diesel engine of the digger and the hammering of the drilling rig have subsided, to be replaced by the scrape of trowels on sediment, accompanied by stone chats and wrens in the trees and a buzzard calling as it circles overhead. As one of the team put it, the pit has changed from a building site to an archaeological site!
Establishing the extent of what has become Area I has proved a challenge as the now-familiar indications of clay extraction for brick making in the 19th century have resulted in a series of quarry cuts and rectangular pits which have limited the available areas of sediments that are known to contain Palaeolithic artefacts. However, there is a sufficiently large area to excavate this year and undoubtedly scope for further work in future years. The small team of excavators are now working in a series of 1m squares to remove the sediments and reveal the archaeology within. As well as recording the position of every artefact, all the excavated sediments will be retained for sieving to establish whether there is any faunal content within the deposits.
The borehole work in and around the pit has significantly increased our understanding of the distribution of the sediments and their relationship with the glacial deposits in the area; tills and gravels have been identified in a number of deep boreholes. In addition, a network of closely spaced shallow boreholes will allow a detailed deposit model of the sediments within the pit to be produced once all the cores have been logged and processed!
The weather has been varied this year; week one saw high winds and rain, week two gave some respite with a few days of fine and sunny weather which always helps to keep the spirits up. Week three looks like being another mixed bag of weather but hopefully all the objectives for this year’s field season will be achieved by the end of the final week and we will have a good assemblage of artefacts and a range of other data from the site to work on over the coming months.