Although we do work on weekends (so the castle visitors can see us in action), we don't do very much. We got on site around 10:30 this morning, took the normal half-hour tea break at 11:30, then an hour lunch at 12:30, and another half-hour tea break at 3:00, then finished at 4:30. And no one did any heavy work; I just troweled the whole time, filling five buckets with dirt and finding a few rusty iron objects, many fish and other bones, and a few pieces of pottery.

At this point I'm a bit bored: too little work, too little in common with the vast majority of the participants, given our large age differences -- a generation -- which makes for lack of common shared experiences and background and culture, despite a common interest in archaeology with many of them (all but the media students). Overall the project seems competently run, but I'd prefer to see people work more when the weather's cooperating and maybe have longer breaks when it's not, rather than always take what seems like overly long breaks when people aren't tired and are doing light work.

About 15 people left today, having done their minimum three-week module for their college classes. A few more have shown up and pitched tents, and apparently more will arrive later tonight. With luck I'll be troweling all week (can't get to the skeletons until next week) and get down into some untouched medieval levels.



A happy sight outside my tent after a supermarket run