My First Dig!

I did my first dig these last two weeks! It was a lot of work! Did you know that when you start a dig you have to de-turf the area that you are working on (usually if it's on private property and you have permission to work there). This means that you have to take the grass and stuff out in square blocks and stack them up so that you can put it all back at the end of the dig. Let me tell you that is a LOT of work for a 10 meter by 2 Meter trench! and then you have to Mattock and shovel out all of the top soil until you find the archaeological layers. In other words I'm a fit and muscled beast now!
I learned a lot on my dig like how to do drawings or Plans (looking down) and Sections (the stratigraphy of the sides aka the layers). I can fill out all sorts of context sheets, and talk about how dirt isn't just dirt and brown it has colors and is made up of different things. I am a great photographer now too!... well sort of... I of course got to break in my new trowel and he earned a name! First thing I found with it was an iron buckle. Not anything cool and not anything old but my trowels name is now Bucky (also for Captain America reasons).
I got nice and dirty during the week. It rained a few times and I came home covered in dirt and mud. Good thing I bought water proof pants and a sweet jacket. If there is one thing England knows how to do it's their rain gear! I stood in the shower and was able to rinse myself off of mud in my clothes and boots, which were also awesomely waterproof. But even with all my effort I got pretty dirty everyday. But hey it's what I was there for right?

This is AFTER I rinsed some of the mud off with TWO water bottles 

I know you all want to know about the archaeology that we found and and all the good stuff but we can't talk about it, sorry. But over all it was a lot of fun! my trench ended up being over a meter deep too! That's a LOT of dirt  to move! Lucky for me we did NOT have to back fill that one.

Anyway, Monday I'm off to Scotland with some of my housemates! I'm SO excited to travel a bit. I'm turning into a regular outdoors person. Got a kick as backpacking backpack and everything. I will take a TON of photos of course and there will be a post about this adventure.

TO SCOTLAND!