Another week done

 Week starting 23/09/24

This week I continued with the same back breaking work, but made good progress. The weather is getting noticeably worse to work in, on Thursday it was so bad that we could not go out all day. Instead the others finished filling out missing context sheets, organising finds and selecting photos. As I had not actually excavated any of my own features I had nothing to do, I was paying attention and trying to pick up on the processes that were happening for a while but the early morning and sitting around got to me and I felt myself dosing off. By halfway through the day everyone had finished the jobs that they could and it was time to back out the deck of cards. The rest of the day consisted of us playing every card game under the sun and some of my co workers competitive sides came out, it was actually quite an interesting day for me as I felt like I got to know everyone that much better. 

Friday the 27th was actually a nice day weather wise so we got back to excavating, I had pretty much finished cleaning the bedrock all the way to the back of the trench when I found a pit feature. It was so close to the edge that I just used the trench boundary as the pit's half section, this is a cut through the feature to see the stratigraphic relationship and separate different fills. This will then be used to create my drawing which I will do on Monday. It was quite a shallow pit and just like many others on the site it had no clearly defined edges and the shape was not uniform. We are describing them as pits but they are really just areas that the Neolithic people excavated for flint in whatever way was easiest, you can tell by the absent flint nodules around the side of the limestone walls. I spent the rest of the day excavating this, I found a couple of nice flint hollow scrapers. 

The weekend of the 24th of September started with me looking for a barber, they were all booked up so I decided to leave it for today and go visit St George's market. It is an indoor market with loads of food, clothes, gifts, art and other random stalls. It was bustling with people and had a really great atmosphere, I got some food but didn't buy any goods, I will definitely be coming back though. I then went to go watch the Arsenal Leicester game and headed home. In the evening I went out with a few new friends from Dalriada village and met my other new friends that I met last week, the students from Queen's University. We started at Lavery's to play pool, then decided we had pop into Spoons as Alyha, and Sulthan had never been to one, Alyha is from America and Sulthan is Indian. We finished the night in another bar and had a great time. 

I woke up slightly late on Sunday but thought I would do something with my day and visited the Ulster Museum. However, I was a bit late and only got an hour there, it seems very good (and is free) and covers a lot, from recent history of the troubles and after, to ancient history and art. I will definitely be returning to check out the rest of it.