Archaeology in Belfast

 Week starting 2/12/2024 We began on Monday by finishing the hoeing of area 3B. There were quite a lot of small features exposed that appeared to be pits and post holes with spreads of charcoal scattered across. One very noticeable feature was a gully shaped stretch of charcoal that extended out of the trench, so it won't be possible to fully excavate. The rain came in the afternoon and stopped work for the day so proper excavation of the features will have to continue tomorrow.  The stone linear in area 3A still needed sections to be excavated, so Gargee and Tom went on with that whilst me Sarah and Mark started on the smaller group of features in area 3B. There were many tags that we'd put down marking where possible features appear, so I started on the edge of the area where the tags were more sparse. Most of these ended up being nothing, after I scraped off the topsoil that appeared a different colour, there was nothing below, although I did get fooled by a couple of stone...

 25/11/24 Mark and I leave area 3A and start hoeing area 3B. Although this is a smaller area along the top of 3A and at the very edge of the site, an earlier look at the area showed it had many features. Before I arrived here they had already found many pieces of pottery and Naomi found an arrow head just on the surface, this is a very cool find. The first couple days was the far edge of the area and we didn't uncover any features really but by Wednesday we got the section where there were many features, you could even see the charcoal without hoeing the surface.  We have uncovered what appears to be a gully, filled with a charcoal fill, unfortunately it seems as if this feature reached beyond the boundary of the site, which is annoying as it was possibly indicating a Bronze Age roundhouse. We have also found pit features, postholes, stakeholes and other features containing different fills. Some of these features appear to be cutting each other, this means one feature going th...

 Week starting 11/11/2024 Arsenal drew to Chelsea, not looking great for us right now but still a long way to go. Anyway work has been okay but just the same really. Honestly, I'm writing this a week and a half in the future so details may be lacking, this is just for me to keep track. I finished in area 2A by Wednesday so Naomi sent me up to area 3A to start hoeing the topsoil off to expose the tops of any features, from the scans we believe there is another stone linear and a distribution of post holes, possibly signifying a structure. Anyway I spent the last 3 days of the week just hoeing, very boring but it was hard to interpret what I was uncovering so I had to keep going to make sure we weren't missing anything. It appeared that I had uncovered another stone linear, adjacent to the one on the scans, that contained what could be some pit features and post holes.  My dad came to visit on the weekend, he arrived on Friday the 15th. Saturday we did a walking tour of Belfast,...

Week starting 4/11/24  Monday I continued excavating the section of the 'wall' rock feature, we have now just been calling it the stone linear feature. We are reasonably confident it was some type of wall, possibly defensive but definitely marking a boundary. Naomi and Mark continued their excavation of the mine shaft, after a couple of days they had got too deep again so had to stop for health and safety reasons. The stone linear is deeper in the middle of the section, changing from a darker more silty clay, containing the stones, down to a firmer, brighter orange clay. Naomi moved on to another pit feature a few metres away from the previous feature I had excavated (the irregular bunch of large stones), it appeared to be the same thing and join up with it, making it likely that it is natural. Thursday the 7th, the digger driver, from the quarry, came to remove more limestone bedrock from the flint mine in area 1A so another shaft could be more accessible to further excavate. ...

 30/10/24 I started my working day on Wednesday by beginning full excavation of the first cleaned section of our basalt rock feature, that we interpret as a wall. The first task was to remove these surface stones but as I got towards the middle of the section they got deeper, larger and more compact, making them harder to remove. This find so far supports the idea that this feature was a wall because the centre would likely be the base of the wall, where the larger foundation stones would lie. Sarah continued excavating the other quarter section of my previous feature and continued to get deeper, finding more large rocks, and proving the feature to be more inconsistent than previously thought. Whilst we did this a quarry worker came with a digger to remove bedrock from the flint mine in area 1A. This is the bedrock above one of mine shafts that were excavated earlier, it is being removed as the shaft was deemed too deep to fully excavate. With the removal of a 1m layer of bedrock a...

 21/10/2024 Today is Monday and I have returned to work on the project at Kilwaughter quarry. The team and I have now moved onto a new area on the site, area 1A was the actual flint mine and we have now moved to area 2A. This is south of the flint mine by about 20 metres and is slightly more raised. We have begun by cleaning the large curve linear line of stones that spread across the area, I mentioned we started this a couple of weeks ago on a day when it was too wet to excavate the mine. At first we were not sure if the feature was natural but now the abundance and placement of the rocks shows that it must have had human interaction. The first suggestion was that it could be the base of a defensive ditch but the lack of finds and defined edge makes us think that it was more likely a bank and the stones have sunk down to leave a rough marker. However, we do not know if the bank had an actual function or if it was just the Neolithic miners' spoil heap, where they chucked the unwant...