Period 2

20th April

It’s that time again! We’ve officially welcomed our new crew for Period 2, and the weather gods held out for us once more as we kicked off the week.

We started the day with our essential introductions, followed by another brilliant site tour led by Rachel. Franki also provided an insightful environmental recap and shared some reflections on our goals for the coming weeks, ensuring everyone is primed and ready to dig into the history.

The team began by cleaning back the excellent work completed by the previous group, focusing on clearing further topsoil near the northern quadrant. It didn’t take long for the site to start yielding its secrets. With the pottery we’ve already seen a lovely assortment of ceramics, including more Samian and classic black burnished ware. Our daily finds continue the trend of finding animal bone alongside some beautiful shards of what appears to be Roman glass.

So far this Monday, the group has successfully avoided the dreaded de-turfing! They may have escaped the heavy lifting for now while we all get settled back in with the sun, shovels, and barrows but the green turf is waiting for us, and we can’t wait to see what lurks beneath. Tommy

24th April

It’s been another wonderful week with our second group of volunteers here at Magna, who have been busy making lots of progress across the site.

The most obvious change onsite is the large amount of grass that has disappeared! This was taken off by machine under the watchful eye of myself and other members of the archaeological team over a couple of days, instead of the months it would have taken to do by hand. The full size of the trench has now been deturfed and while its still just a large blank area of topsoil for now, it gives a sense of how large the commanding officer’s house will be when it’s fully excavated.

The turf removal also included the extension on the southwest corner of the trench, where we will be going into the southern ditches of the fort very soon. Already the volunteers have been able to define a bank of clay and stone following the curve of the fort’s corner in this area which appear to be dropping off into much darker, softer soil to the south, suggesting this may be the bank between the fort wall and the top edge of the ditch.

Elsewhere work is also continuing on the post-Roman wall, exposing further sections of both the south and west sides. I’m hoping that the full circuit of this wall or rampart is within our excavation area and are currently looking for where the southeast and northwest corners might be, sorting through the collapsed upper structure to find the foundations underneath.

Within the existing trench work is continuing in the praetorium to remove the antiquarian backfill and define the surviving pieces of Roman structure. A big step forward in this mission has been tying the remains we have in the ground to the sketch plan made during the antiquarian excavation. This wasn’t as straight forward as it sounds since it turns out they drew the north arrow pointing in the wrong direction! Once we worked out that north was actually east the remains we have started to make a lot more sense and we realised some of the rubble deposits actually mark out the lines of walls rather being random dumps of stone.

Some of the infill in these rooms dates back to the Roman period and is evidence of the building being modified throughout its lifetime; we’ve started to remove some of this to establish the original layout and have been rewarded with some lovely finds including an intaglio and more painted wall plaster. Rachel