One lovely site

Looking good

Hello archaeological babies. This week I bring you a quick update on the excavation’s progress. We’ve been hard at it getting the site ‘tidy’ for a big photoshoot. It was a pretty demanding model, presenting us with a rider that specified it would only drink spring-fed bottled water, eat Tasmanian crayfish, listen to Coldplay, snack on only green M&Ms and that nobody could make eye contact.

With these bizarre conditions met, Sylvana and myself managed to get the photoshoot completed on Wednesday. Usually we’re after a nice even (diffuse) light, which is why a slightly cloudy day is generally perfect. Of course, as happens every time we try to do photogrammetry, the sun was turned up to 11 – meaning that lots of shadows get introduced to the photographs. Unfortunately, we needed to get it done, with rain forecast for the weekend. You can see the photogrammetry process that we followed here.

After a day of processing, we’re pretty pleased with the result:

Lotsa dirt

A daunting task lies ahead…

As you can see, we’ve exposed the ca.1856 footings of the foundry building. These were situated under demolition contexts, derived from the robbing of the footings during the 1880s salvage. The interior of the foundry has a lot of stuff going on. Can you pick all the separate deposits scattered across the area? There’s an orangey clay silt (left half), charcoal, fine white sand, crushed sandstone and brick, mortar and lots of silt impregnated with charcoal and metal. In short, this looks like an in situ foundry floor. Below is the photograph with a rough plan of the contexts superimposed, which we use on site to help us work out what we are recording and excavating.

Made up lines

Plan with made-up contexts superimposed

Next week we get into the excavation of the interior deposits. We’ve devised a pretty rigorous sampling strategy for this, involving bulk sampling of deposits (for later lab analysis), fine-mesh sieving (to catch the macro-scale artefacts). It’ll be slow, but that’s archaeology (when you’re doing it right, that is).