Away with the Fairies- The Travel Diary of an Irish WebFairy

I've always wanted to be an Archaeologist. Thats no lie! I found a school copy from when i was in 3rd class (8-9 years old) with list of what i wanted to be when i was older. Archaeologist was there surrounded by stars. (mind you so was Nun, but thats when i once believed that nuns where senior nurses! )
I went on to study Field Archaeology in college. Field Archaeology is your basic archaeology; career based around digging excavations. Our job was to trowel back the site, mark the features and map them via grids and co-ordinates, giving each feature located a fill/ context no. and a cut no. The fill or context no is the soil that has filled in the feature, and any other fills that are found after the original alocation are also given no's. These layers of fill are stratigraphy! After the initial mapping of the site, we would then proceed to be alocated features to excavate, each feature would then be individually graphed and giving a Plan no.

When we have planned the feature we then have to set up a centre line to divide the feature in two; one half to be excavated so we can plan the stratigraghy of the feature.

For small features we would generally use a trowel, but for big ones it was a mattock(like a pick axe), shovel and wheel barrow job. A lot of features are large so the myth of all archaeologists use for excavations is a trowel is a lie!
When excavating a feature you generally take a soil sample of every stratigraphy and have to fill out a context sheet discribing it, colour, texture and make up, e.g. F345 was a mottled yellowish brown silty clay, containing small gravel like stones that were sub rounded in shape. Also any finds get put into a finds tray and then bagged and marked with the fill no of the strata it was found in. They can help date the fill. All the finds are separated by type (obviously) pottery with similar pottery, bone with bone, and ferrous items together.
If a remarkable find happens to be located in-Situe, its generally photographed. Every feature, section and fully excavated feature are photograghed and catalogued.
When you have finished your section you generally excavate the other side of the feature and when you are done you photograph it, plan it and record the cut on a cut sheet.
When all the features in an area are fully excavated, the whole area is once again mapped and graphed and photographed.
So thats the general daily business of a field Archaeologist. Aint nothing like Indiana Jones, but one can dream!

I'll tell you about some of the sites i worked on in my next blog!