Archaeology in Belfast

 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...