A new area

 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 unwanted rubble that they dug from the mine. It is difficult to work out now as there are pit features and deposits of charcoal around and in the stone 'arch', so when they are excavated it may expose some more information. I will continue to clean the stone feature tomorrow. 

For the remainder of the week Mark and I continued to excavate this stone arch feature, taking several cuts along it and the pit features inside it, including one with dark charcoal soil. From this, we have developed a theory that it could have been a defensive wall, this is because there appears to be a possible gap in the stone formation, that could be a walkway through. Plus, the distribution of the stones generally goes from large to small, as if a wall had fallen. Another reason is that almost all the stones are basalt, originally I thought it was just a spoil heap, where they threw all the crap they had dug from the mine, but if this were the case it would be full of limestone bedrock. The pits came out with some pottery and other flint finds, including tools and mined rocks but this does not really tell us anything for now, so they have us a bit stumped. 

A few post holes have also been found just away from the edge of the large basalt stone feature, excavated by Prianca and Garge. They are quite close to each other so it is unlikely they were holding up any kind of structure, it is possible they were markers or monuments, having a functional reason or ceremonial. On the Friday the 25th of October I began excavating another feature, a large uneven oval of basalt rocks sat in silty gravel. After work I flew to Bournemouth for the weekend - this is just for me to keep track of what I was doing at the time, you guys don't need to know the details of that!

By the end of Tuesday the 29th I finished excavating my quarter section of the feature I started on Friday. I took out all the rocks and gravel down to an orange clay subsoil, which is definitely natural. It was getting deeper towards the middle of the feature and the other quarter, excavated by Sarah, is much deeper than mine. I do not think it is a very interesting feature, it contains large basalt rocks, some flint and no artefacts, so my theory is that this was an extra pile of material that the Neolithic occupants didn't use for the larger basalt stone feature we just excavated. 

As I write this it is Tuesday evening, so I will move on to the next feature tomorrow.