I was at the CAA2008 Conference in Hungary for a couple of days last week. Presenting a short paper on this website and digital project. Now that I have returned it is good to see that the team have made lots of progress opening up new excavation areas and also dealing with the archaeology in the existing areas.

The CAA conference is about Computer Applications in Archaeology and is a really good place to present a case study of what we are doing with this project. The paper I presented set out some information about who we are and about the project. I also talked a bit about some of the problems and challenges of trying to set up a project like this. I will make the presentation into a PDF so that it can be loaded onto the website.

It was great to see progress on site from the photo diaries and I particularly liked reading Gary’s last journal entry. However it was a big shock to see all the progress on site with my own eyes.

The main difference is that we have now opened up a much bigger area of the site for excavation. At the end of last week the team used the machine to remove the modern overburden in the south western corner of the site. This means digging down to the top of the archaeology and then stopping to hand clean and record the remains.

As well as the progress with the machine, the other big difference is that many of the post medieval pits and features have now been excavated and we are getting ready to excavate the earlier remains.

One area that is causing us a few problems at this time is a large late medieval pit that we saw during the evaluation. It is either a single really large feature or a series of intercutting features. I won’t say too much about this for now but hopefully there will be more to follow as we unravel this part of the stratigraphy.