Book

 'A Digger's Life: trowels & tribulations in archaeology' is available on Kindle via Amazon Books.

Chris Tripp has dug into his personal archaeological story to tell how he has touched the past. He describes how and why he became a professional archaeologist and began excavating fascinating sites, finding wonderful artefacts and experiencing the deeper past during a thirty year career. How he saw Roman London’s first beginnings, unearthed a medieval hospital and exhumed a Bronze Age skeleton.  Meet his fellow diggers, some friendly, some not so friendly and some just eccentric, but all equally interesting to know. Chris also began his work with local communities, helping them find the heritage they share under their feet. If you have ever wondered what diggers really do and why they do it, this book will give you a unique insight into the small world of archaeology and archaeologists, to the extent that you will never watch ‘Time Team’ in the same way ever again.  

Trench trial

As we do not have access to a digging machine at the moment we are confined to trial trenches and recording what we can. Back filling by hand is the real trial. 

The Great Ditch was picked up again and with lots of finds, but we could not dig to the base as it was getting too dangerous - again. Frustrating.

The shovel is standing in a 600mm wide cut into bedrock. 600mm is the standard width of walls on this site, so may be a robbed out one. The cut can be seen in the section and reaches to just under the subsoil. The surrounding land is made up of dumped material.

 

Finds Found

Some nice finds from the site last week. Here are some examples.

Wavy dish fragment.

Scraffito fragment.

Bottle tops are good for dating, as they changed over time. Late 17th c.

Decorated lead flashing.

Copper button possibly copying woven examples.