We had a great day yesterday with some great students. We continued work in Area 1, just to the east of the three grid squares that we surveyed last week. In that area we excavated around 30cm, getting through the topsoil and clay subsoil to a layer of compacted brick, stone and mortar. This is no doubt rubble from a demolished home, but we are still on top of it so whether this is actually on the house or next to the house is a bit up in the air. No artifacts aside from a few bits of window pane glass.
The gradiometer finally arrived from Frobisher in England, and holy cow is it awesome! A gradiometer measures the fluctuations in the magnetic field in a given space, and then allows you to make a map of the variance. It is good for locating ditches, pits, and some buildings, particularly timber when there is a ditch. Im still going through the results but the speed and simplicity of the Frobisher gradiometer was amazing. It records readings on an SD card that can then be put in a computer for analysis…no transfer cables or file conversions! I will post an image later.
We got rained out today. It has settled in for a while. We had some hard working students yesterday…Thursday we will really have some work to do.
