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‘It was very hard going this morning,’ says Jane, ‘just a few centimetres under the surface, and cropping up all over the place, is an old barge bed made of compacted chalk. This made it rather difficult to get the auger started.’
Jane and her team are trying to find the level of the original Bronze Age working surface in the layers they discover. Provisional analysis looks good .
During the afternoon Onsite caught up with Mick Aston for his thoughts so far.
‘I approached this with some trepidation. When I got here yesterday evening I thought "Oh dear here we go again", but by this morning I was caught up with the buzz and well on my way to getting into another series. It’s always the same. The programmes look like they carry on into the distance but then when you’re in the swing of it things are fine.’
‘I’ve actually taken a year's sabbatical from Bristol University. I’m still working with my post-graduate students, but otherwise I’m taking a bit of a break. This lets me concentrate on Time Team, the writing up of the Shapwick project post excavation reports, and my monasteries book. I’ve been saying that I’m starting my monasteries book for ages, well now I really have!’
Mick spent his afternoon on the Thames riding in an ex-army DUKW which is like a truck and boat combined into one on road / off road / on water vehicle. He was accompanied by Stewart Ainsworth (Time Team’s landscape lumps and bumps man) and Gus Milne from University College London who is a specialist in archaeology on the Thames.
‘If we do anything to change the water flow around the remaining posts it could speed up the erosion process,’ said Gus.
The main point of using the DUKW was to travel the course of the river. Stewart is trying to reconstruct how the river may have looked in the Bronze Age, and it would have been quite different from how it looks today.
‘I’m looking at the Admiralty soundings for the river dating back to 1580. That’s long before the embankments were here. I’m also looking at a range of different maps to try and determine the original landscape,’ said Stewart.
Keep posted to these pages for updates on how he’s getting on.
Tomorrow looks like it’s going to be a good day. Time Team are going to get the results in on the auger core survey, the post hole fill is going to be investigated, Stewart will be running over his theories for the course of the Bronze Age river, and Phil will be helping with the reconstruction cameo.
