uploading the Butt Road car-park site context sheets

Today (1st March), Trust archaeologist Ben Holloway was, unusually, indoors at Roman Circus House and not out on site. He was uploading data from the context sheets from our excavation of the Butt Road car-park site, which he supervised, to our digital archive.

Every feature which we excavate on a site is planned using totalstation and also, perhaps, manually, depending on the complexity of the feature/s; photographed; and then recorded on a context sheet. The data is used to create the digital and paper archive of the site which, along with the final report and the finds, forms the archaeological record.

The images show Ben at work today and one of the context sheets. This one is of a Roman cremation burial which was in the form of a grey ware pot which had been buried upright and was filled with cremated human bone. The bone had been collected from a funeral pyre. The pot had been damaged, as had many of the vessels found on the site, perhaps during the construction of the Artillery (Le Cateau) Barracks. The bone will be analysed by an osteologist to determine the age and, perhaps, the gender of the deceased person.

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