Archaeology in Belfast

 9/12/2024 All week Naomi had me excavating a large section of the stone linear in area 3B, I didn't mind this as it was quite hard work that kept me moving in the cold weather. Plus, the feature actually became quite interesting, I cleared down the sides of the linear removing quite a lot of smaller stones. In the base there was a line of huge stones interlocking with each other with smaller ones jammed between them to clearly make a sturdy structure, our interpretation is that it was a wall of some kind. As I was doing this Naomi was excavating a section of the same stone linear feature, however, her's contained a large pit that was cutting through the stone linear, it went deep and had enormous stones in the bottom, impossible to move. It's a little hard to work out of it was a part of the same feature but I think the pit must have been made after, Naomi suggested that it may be a hunting pit for trapping animals. One of the most interesting discoveries though was from M...

 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...