Answering questions

Archeology is all about answering questions. You're not looking for artefacts only to accumulate them, but to understand past civilisations and how they worked. This page will show you a few examples of the questions we try to answer by excavating.

Defensiv ditch

Before


Those two pictures show a ditch during its excavation. But firstly we just saw the difference of colors of the soils. Indeed, you can see on the left of the left picture a line of darkest soil, which fit with the dictch. So we decided to dig a part of it, to see its section and see how deep and with what angle the slope was going.

Work


Here you can see the team working on it: trowelling softly to see if we can find the slope itself ( dark color ), and if its not enough, digging with a matic, cleaning it with the showel, and trowelling again until we can find the slope.

After

Here is the result. You don't have to care about the little part left on the left top corner of the dicth.
It was only left because archeologists are lazy...
We found the slope: it wasn't really deep, and the angle was quite slow.
So the ditch is too small to be defensiv: anyone can cross it in a few seconds.
It can't be unfinished, because the inhabitants finished bigger works, and didn't abandonned the fort at this period.
So it could be symbolic: religious or maybe to separate the different classes of inhabitants.
On conclusion, we don't really know what this is...

Modern hole

Before

Then we found this small hole with a 'L' shaped line of darkest soil above it.
It is obvious that is is modern, because its background is above the ground level of the Iron Age one.
It may have been dug around ten years ago. So it's not archeology.
But it still interested us: what is inside? Here are a few hypotesis which can seem absurd but we quite belevied in:
-A human corpse: the line of darkest soil is the size of an average human, and by the way Dave used to lay on it to prove it.
-The grave of the oldest goat in the world: the warden of the national park, Phil, said he owned the oldest goat in the world - oldest because it was fed by welsh grass, which was unique - and when it died by 20 years old, Phil burried it and never told anybody were the grave was...
Harold was quite excited about it!