Hello everyone. Today we extended our upper trench at Hof so that it cut completely through one of the structures there. We do not know the the date or purpose of the building, but we suspect it to be a type of house dated sometime after the Viking Age. We hoped to find charcoal or bones under the structure's walls in order to date it. We did find those items, and more. Just before lunchtime I discovered a series of stones, mostly rounded, about fist-sized, that had holes all the way through them.

The stones formed a cluster near one of the walls, just on the inside. I firmly believe that the people living here used them as loom weights. Back then, they had looms that stood up against a wall, and they tied strings to weights in order to hold them down while they threaded other strings in between, thus producing cloth. The stones themselves offer no way to date anything, because people used that kind of loom around here for a long time. However, a few pieces of wood came to light amongst these stones, and we can send them in for dating once we return to the States.

Digging a trench eleven meters long by half wide by half to 1m deep took the three of us all day. We hit the hot tub here at the school immediately before dinner, and it sounds like an early bedtime for us. Before then, though, I have to go through the charcoal and bone and wood samples in order to ensure that all get logged correctly because we have to be exactly sure where we found them in relation to the stones in the trench.

Tomorrow we begin work at Reynistadir, where a small backhoe will open about a dozen trenches for us to examine. We have to draw all the trench profiles before the end of work on Saturday, so we will have to operate efficiently and quickly. We will return to Hof at some point in the future, so if you have been paying attention to the work there, no need to fear not finding out what's afoot there.

Doing the actual drawing takes little time, with one person making measurements and the other marking on graph paper. Deciding where to take the measurements, however, eats up the day because we have to decide where to take the readings. In some cases layers of soil stand out and pose no problem, but in others the layers gradually blend together so that the top differs from the bottom a great deal. In such a case, we have to decide where to draw the line because a line must be drawn - the layers differ too much to group together.