Site Diary: Trench 3

The cairn is divided in four

This week the cairn has been planned and we to start dig it next week. We will do this by dividing the cairn into four equal parts (called quadrants) like sharing a cake between four people. Two of these quadrants diagonally opposite each other will be excavated first so that as we dig deeper we can create vertical sections through the cairn. These will help us to see how the cairn was built, was it constructed in one go, or was it created in different phases?

Flints and pottery found!

In the ground around the cairn we have started to remove the prehistoric soil which was covered by peat. In this soil we are finding pieces of flint and sherds of later prehistoric pottery. Most of the flint comprises small flakes, produced as waste during the making of stone tools by being knocked away from a larger piece of flint.

Amongst the flint we have also found two implements; a thumbnail scraper to the north of the cairn and a narrow flint blade, used as a scraping tool, which the rabbits had again discovered first. The densities of objects, comprising nearly 100 finds to date, suggest more than just the typical 'background' levels you would expect to discover across the moorland.

We may be starting to identify an area where activities have been concentrated in the past. As we dig deeper we will be able to identify whether any of these finds are associated with features, such as pits or structures, and whether different types of objects concentrate together. From this we should be able to interpret why these objects were discarded here.