Alan's done it again, following up on his star find of vitrified furnace lining from yesterday with another large chunk which looks like the top of the furnace:
It's looking good and we now think there might be enough intact to get some archaeomagentic dates on it, so watch this space:
Elsewhere we've been frantically filling sandbags in preparation for backfilling, which starts tomorrow in the lower part of the site, that's 1,500 we've done which looks a lot but not sure how far they'll go, the intention is to protect the more fragile parts of the site with sandbags, but then lay a huge amount of stone over the bags to keep them in place. Luckily we're not short of stone!
We had a fair few visitors today again, including Carly Hilts, the editor of Current Archaeology magazine along with her partner, in Orkney to do a round up of Orkney's digging season for a future issue of the magazine:
I did a site tour for them but I didn't notice that she was wearing such stylish purple boots until looking at the photos. We've had some very nice pieces about Swandro in Current Archaeology in previous seasons, so looking forward to reading this one too.
Elvire and Chloe were kept busy doing final photo cleans for the last record shots before we put the site to bed for the winter:
Then Alan demonstrated the fine art of positioning photographic scales for one of Steve's photos:
This is harder than it looks, especially for the vertical scales, you've just got them perfectly aligned when a gust of wind comes in and sends them flying and you have to do it all again. At least with Swandro we've got plenty of rocks to stand on the get the scales in position so you don't leave boot prints everywhere.
Weather forecast doesn't look great for tomorrow but we need to push on regardless as we now only have a week for the backfilling, so the pressure is now on, we'll be fine as long as we don't weaken!
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