Counting Shovels

This morning, Dan, Chris, Gareth and I packed up the vans and transported all of the kit that we are going to need for the next three weeks of excavating up to Basing House. The weather was gorgeous (continuing on this week’s theme) and we stopped at Barton’s Mill (a very nice pub just next-door to Basing House) for a quick soft drink with lots of ice before returning in convoy to Southampton.

If you are interested in our equipment, you can speak to Dan when you are on site. He is the Excavation Supervisor and will be able to talk you through what we use each tool for. I did a quick tally, and we have already taken over 300 pieces of equipment up to site with us (and that’s not counting individual nails, pencils and sheets of paper!).

You may notice in the background of this photo that there is a mysterious looking dome. This is an invention by a colleague, David Selmo, who has been working on a way to create images with an intereactive lightsource of objects that are underwater. This piece of equipment is awesome. We had to take it out of storage in order to safely bring out all of the kit, but as it is in this image, I can share a link to a video that David made of the uRTI (which stands for Underwater Reflectance Transformance Imaging) in action.

And here is a description of some of the work that David has been doing with this technique. In this instance, he has been working on coming up with a way to record trenails (this is a kind of wooden dowel which fixes the huge planks around the frame of the ship) on HMS Invincible, a wreck that has been underwater since the middle of the 1700s: http://cma.soton.ac.uk/blog/2013/06/underwater-rti-hms-invincible/

Filed under: Excavation Plans, Summer Excavation Tagged: buckets, equipment, mattocks, preparation, rti, shovels, spades, urti