Dig Diary End of 2010 Season
Unfortunately we lost a lot of the pictures for the last two months of
the dig because my camera was playing up and finally died. But we do
have pictures of the day we moved the saddle quern from
the old roundhouse at the bottom of the field to the site of the new
house we are still building. The quern is on loan from the
Royal Cornwall
Museum and it is dated to
the Bronze Age 3,500 years ago. It was excavated from a field near Chun
castle in
West Cornwall 30 years ago.
A friend that has a family business demonstrating
cannon fire lent us her cannon pulley to move it. Most saddle querns are
easily picked up being no more than a granite slab, but the one we have
is more like a boulder than a saddle quern! It does however have the
advantage of being higher off the ground which makes it less strain on
the back when grinding
grain on
it for hours on end. The spines of some prehistoric women have been
found when excavated to have wear marks on the lower vertebra indicating
this type of repetitive work. Fig 1 to 3
We of course excavated pit 42 and found the latest of the ritual
pits the Goat pit which is on the
home page for you to look at with an I tube link. We continued to
excavate area H and found what might be a hearth for some sort of metal
working process but we will have to wait until next year to find out in
detail what it is.
The new roundhouse build has been going on every week
throughout the season and into the autumn. We spent five full days
cutting reeds on the marshes at Marazion on the South coast which was
really gruelling work. The reed beds picture 5 are no more than a mass
of floating roots over a lake. One finds that when one walks over it to
collect the reeds being cut when your leg disappears into muddy water up
to your thighs. My local team thought we were only going
to be cutting for two days but when it covered three weekends
their hunched shoulders when they started yet another day on the marshes
said it all. I kept telling them when we started the project that
building a house is not the problem it is cutting the wood and reeds and
getting it back that is the real work. The oak trees we are using for
the ring beam of the house came
from an Iron age Hill fort picture 6. Which is good because we
are helping to save the archaeology from tree roots at the same time as
we are building the same house that would have been there in the Iron
Age. We started on the 11
th January and we are just starting
the thatching of it now. We have daub making in mid winter to look
forward to and I wonder if they will think reed cutting was not so bad
after they have thrown icy cold wet clay at the walls a few times. But
this is home building prehistoric style and it was not meant to be easy
but it is so very rewarding when you are sitting in a finished
roundhouse by an open fire eating a bit of clay baked salmon and
drinking prehistoric beer.
We will be putting up more
pictures of the build during the winter for you to see and we are going
to have a party however finished we are on the anniversary of the day we
started the build in mid January.