Digging Hill 80 - Fifth Report

No silly photo to lead off today.  It was a good day of work, one with sunny weather, good company and interesting finds.  But a bit of a somber day as well.

With the cellars essentially done the focus of work shifted today to trenches.  There is quite a network of these known or suspected, and many segments that are designated for at least a cross section.  Some of these turn out to be just shell holes or natural features.  The bona fide trenches we do find are surprisingly shallow, but to be fair there has been quite a bit of archaeologically uninformative top soil that was scraped off at the beginning of the project.   

The day started off with a nice find:

Here we have a British "Brodie" helmet being carefully excavated.  It turned out to be an isolated find, its owner not in the area.

I was working with an American couple who had never done any archaeology before.  We had a good time working a couple of trench sites that turned out to be nothing much, maybe just shell holes.  Here's a nice picture of them as a background for me holding up a bit of brass timing band from a shell.

Below is a somewhat bigger piece of same.  These were made of high quality brass. One imagines that most of the church bells of Europe were melted down for this profane purpose....

They seemed to be getting along pretty well, so they were put into a section of trench right next to where I was finishing up.  And wouldn't you know....in minutes they had encountered human remains.

No photos of that trench or of any finds associated with it.  We just tidied up for the anthropology crew to do a proper job of exhumation.

Then onto another trench section where I finished the day by finding a shovel.  Not much difference in this technology from a hundred years ago to today.