Dig Diary – did a pair of standing stones mark Twenty-Seven’s entrance?

Day Thirty-Eight
Monday, August 12, 2024

Definitely not the best start to the final week of excavation – a weather warning for thunderstorms and a morning of rain and south-easterly gales gusting to 50mph across the site.

As a result, we had to close the gates until conditions improved – we couldn’t have diggers and visitors being blown into the trenches.

The forecast was optimistic. Those of us on site less so.

But although digging had been thwarted (yet again) it provided another valuable opportunity to get stuck into the paperwork. And believe me there’s a lot of it on a dig this complex.

The bulk of our diggers had been told to make their way to site at 12.30pm, at which time we were finally able to open the gates. By the time the 1pm tour was en route to Structure Ten, the sun had emerged and we were back in the trenches.

In Structure Five, work around the remains of the furniture features continued to produce artefacts – this time a bone point (as we’ve explained before, a rarity at the Ness) and a beautiful worked stone tool.

The latter, which was partially polished in parts, was remarkably similar to the (slightly smaller) one unearthed by Travis in Structure Twenty last week.

In Trench Z, Lewis exposed more of the core of the 4.5 metre wall section at the end of last week. Today, he turned his attention to the hearth of Structure Two – the building overlying the massive wall.

In Structure Twelve – and after three years working in the building’s north-end – Sigurd was able to remove what looked remarkably like an anvil stone outside the north-western corner recess.

Rectangular in profile, the pillar-like orthostat had a pointed end. It had been deliberately sunk into the building’s floor and firmly jammed in place with tightly fitting packing stones.

At some point the quartzite “potato” hammerstone from last week had been left at its base.

Structure Twelve has produced two anvil stones in previous seasons – one in the north-eastern corner and the other set into the floor just inside the blocked southern entrance.

Featuring an oval perforation running through its upper half, the latter looked like a large needle and current thinking is that it may have been used to clamp long bones so they could be broken to reach the marrow.

The problem with the latest anvil candidate was that its uppermost end showed little sign of use. The north-eastern example, in contrast, had clearly been heavily used, as evident by the impact marks.

In Twelve’s south-eastern corner Eponine and Carla are expanding the sondage to expose and clarify more of Structure Twenty-Eight’s corner buttress, while Tom continued his quest to further define more of the earlier building.

To the north-east of Twelve, Alice, Ben and Ray have been delving deeply into the mystery that is the “mega-drain” opening in Structure Thirty-Four. But although more has been exposed, the mystery just deepens.

Is it really a drain, as we originally thought, or just a gap between two earlier buildings? The goal is to continue excavating and see if we can’t get to the bottom to it.

Over now to Structure Twenty-Seven, which was a hive of activity once the weather improved. As well as exposing more of its extensive drainage network, work on its floors is now reaching the building’s foundation layers.

At the north-western corner, the operation to record and recover the extensive deposit of animal bone is nearing completion.

But it’s the single north-eastern entrance that caught attention today, with the discovery of an orthostat setting directly outside. It’s too early to say for sure yet, but was Twenty-Seven’s entrance, like Twelve’s and Ten’s, marked by a pair of standing stones?

Watch this space.