Archaeology in Belfast

 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...

My third full week working on the project started on the 30th of September, it was an overcast and cold morning but I tried to keep my morale high. I had finished excavating the cross section of the pit feature and was ready to complete the section drawing. However, it started raining straight away so I starting cleaning up the edges of the trench, the rain kept getting worse and I was getting nowhere, if anything I was making it more dirty so we went inside to wait out the rain. The rain continued and there was no point attempting to excavate but we are still behind on schedule and supposed to have this trench finished by Thursday (no chance), so we went out and started cleaning a rock feature in the section 2A, where we will move to next. This was an arched strip of medium sized rocks, stretching around the south section of the mine about 20 metres south of the edge of the trench 1A, Naomi theorised that it was a bank that had been washed away, marking a boundary of a possible enclos...