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My fellow (armchair?) archaeologists: Another quick update is in store.

In my last post, I had mentioned that we were seeing a trench with large stones which seems to be coming off of our main feature, which we’re thinking may be a drain. Well, here are a few more photos of the trench and stones:

The trench with its large stones comes off of our main stone feature/pit at a slightly northwest angle.

 

A shot the opposite way around, facing south.

 

A view of the trench's relationship to the rest of the excavation area.

 

Some iron and wood is showing up in the trench alongside and under the stones.

 

Today’s dig was concurrent with the second day of the annual Acadian Days festival at Grand-Pré. On Saturday – which we weren’t around for – there were a number of public lectures on topics relevant to Grand-Pré and on Sunday, all sort of activities were going on on the grounds, including a Catholic mass, concerts, the construction of a traditional haystack, etc. If you’ve never been to Grand-Pré for Acadian Days, I strongly recommend you check out the Société Promotion Grand-Pré’s website next summer for details on next year’s events.

Anyway, so we were on site to dig a little ourselves, explain what we were doing to any tourists or other members of the public, and answer any questions about what we were doing. It was really great to see so many of the participants from the public programmes of the past come out to see how things had progressed.

I began to remove more stone in our window area, and below it is a considerable amount of charcoal and general dark staining.

Dark staining and flecks of charcoal are visible in the red clay right under the area where I've removed some stones.

I suppose it’s important to understand my frame of mind, here. We had worked very carefully around these stones for quite sometime, in the event that they were structural. When we got under the stones and there was lots of mottled clay, with a fair amount of artefacts (most of them heat-altered), timbers and burn material, I thought that we were in a destruction level (the material on top, caused by the structure collapse) which would peter out relatively quickly into an occupation level (the actual contents of the building).

This, sadly, proved to be both right and wrong. The destruction material did peter out fairly quickly, but in its place was not the occupation level I had hoped for, but thick, dense clay which seems to be fill. Half a metre of it. I don’t think I need to tell you that this was a very gradually discouraging discovery on the second-to-last day of our dig.

Nevertheless, at this point I was still optimistic that I could get through the clay in the window area and see what was below it within a few hours. I’d only just started into it and I was feeling extremely chipper about the possibility of getting through it quickly and into the good stuff. You’ll see in my next post how close and how far that goal became!

The nearly endless clay that at this point we did not yet realise was nearly endless!

The State of the Unit on our second-to-last day of digging. Still so much to do!

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