Binchester 2014: Day Twenty/Twenty One

Apologies once again for missing another day. I'm currently burning the candle at both ends a little, so battling to keep up with the blog. On Friday I was helping our latest crop of BA Archaeology students graduate from Durham University and today I took some of our US guests up to the North Pennines to try and think about how the Romans might have engaged with and explored the upland areas further up the river Wear.

So, what has changed on site in the last couple of days? Not a huge amount primarily because across the site we have been focussing on planning and recording. That is not to say there has been no movement at all. In Trench 1 we are persevering with clearing the turret, and there is lots of work clearing the barrack floor. In the course of this one of our US crew revealed a rather nice length of worked stone drain. It is sitting in the middle of the floor of the northern compartment of the barrack block, but it is not clear if it in situ.

In Trench 2, the central strip building has had a lot of work on the floor revealing a large burnt spread. Nearby, some large scoops or shallow pits are being explored around the stone mortar wall that seems to mark the bath precinct boundary. We are also still chipping away at the floor surfaces related to the buildings in front of the bath-house Finally, there has been continued earth moving on the areas where we have expanded the trench to the north and east of the bath-house. In the course of this, one of my favourite finds of the season was uncovered- a beautiful miniature ceramic face, probably from a Crambeck parchment ware vessel (later 4^th century AD).