Still cold but no snow

 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 through another, this indicates that this area clearly has different times of occupation. 

On Thursday the 28th, Naomi showed me the results for some absolute dates from a site they had excavated previously nearby, these were done through Carbon dating. It was a domestic site that had occupations from the Early Neolithic all the way through to the Early Medieval. Of course, it is unlikely that this occupation was continuous from c.3900 BC to c.400 BC but it was used domestically in each time period, known through excavation of houses. The longest period of occupation, however, was the Middle Neolithic, the same time period as our flint mine. It seems likely that either this was the settlement of the miners that had excavated this area for flint or at least known of this settlement and likely traded with them, probably even friends. 

Friday the 29th was a bit of a miss, Naomi was away and so was almost everyone else, another supervisor from FarrimondMacManus, Tom, replaced Naomi but other than that it was only Gargee and I on site. We continued cleaning area 3B until 10am, when the quarry workers came to warn us they were carrying out a blast at 10:30, this meant we had to clear off site. During this time Tom took us to the site I mentioned earlier, that is just down the road. The site was uncovered due to a housing developer getting planning permission in 2022, so it has been over 2 years since the excavations. The foundations of the houses were there but nothing else and all the trenches were grown over. Tom got out the aerial photos of the post excavated site so we could understand where certain feature groups were as we were looking at it. If when the dates for our Neolithic flint mine come back as the same as the domestic houses from the Neolithic at this site, it may give us a much clearer picture of the area's narrative. It is only about a mile away from the mine so if the dates are the same it is likely that this was one of there settlement occupations for living, farming etc. and walked to the mine for to retrieve flint material.  We worked until lunch but after that it started raining heavily and it we were getting nowhere with cleaning, so took shelter inside. 

On the weekend I travelled to Dublin for a visit, I stayed the night in a hotel and had a good explore of the city. I returned on Sunday via coach.