Word: dig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chalk downs above Itchen and watch the sun set (or rise). Pleasures were few and primitive--cigarettes and cider were the staples of digger life. Romance was always available, although usually tenuous, but a handful of digger marriages, generally between male site supervisors and female diggers, have graced the dig's past...
Queueing (standing in line) was a distinctive feature of the dig. Diggers queued for everything of necessity--for showers (three for 150 people), sinks, toilets (about 1 per 25 people), meals and equipment. After scraping the ground, shovelling, dumping buckets of waste earth, and balancing precariously to avoid disfiguring the areas I'd already worked over, my, first instinct was to beat everyone else back to the dining room in order to avoid a queue. As I spent most of the summer digging in medieval leather tanning pits, wallowing amid the preserved medieval pig manure used to cure hides...
...labor of excavation itself proved, in varying degrees, exciting to diggers, although novices exported romantic notions about archeology which the dig pitilessly disillusioned. Every volunteer was instructed by his site supervisor in a crash course about field methods, and learned to dig by trial and error. Field work was really manual labor. At one site during the final season, diggers pick-axed for nine hours through modern street pavement and bedrock every day before they could begin the usual troweling, which was far less tiring, but more painstaking work. To dig well required patience and exactitude, imagination and endurance...
...first week could have qualified for such commendation. Being new and eager, I offered to work my first Sunday, the only free day of the week, on a rescue dig. Bulldozers excavating for the foundations of a modern office building had unearthed important remains of the southern gate into the town, and a mercy period of several weeks was granted for an excavation to exhaust the site before modern construction destroyed it forever. Under the pressure of a deadline, some ten diggers worked at a fast pace in the cold and rain all day. I barely knew what...
CERTAIN IMPORTANT specific insights yielded by the dig may be summarized. The Iron Age community's perimeter was defined, and its size and character computed. Biddle estimates it probably did not last longer than the beginning of the first century A.D. Evidence of Belgic settlement is still subject to doubt, but the character of the Roman town is fairly well understood. The town's fourth century A.D. Roman burial ground produced evidence, substantiated by other data of the 1969 season, to suggest that a garrison of foreign soldiers, distinct from the rest of the population, defended late Roman Winchester...