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deturfing

Week One at the Basing House Excavation

This year, alongside staff from the Universities of Southampton and York and volunteers from Basingstoke Archaeological and Historical Society, we have a fantastic group of undergraduate students from the University of Southampton learning all about archaeological fieldwork. The students are a mixture of first and second years, and are studying degrees in Archaeology or Archaeology with History. We asked two of the team to put together a blog post summarising the first week on site. Continue reading →

Day 7 – Quick Photo Diary

One of our excellent student reporters will be writing up an article about today’s archaeology, so I just thought I’d share some photos from my mobile phone to give you an idea of how our day went. Early morning site tour Each team explained their archaeology from the day before We all updated one another on what we’d been up to Quick progress shot during coffee break, before the troops returned. It was actually warm enough today to all have an ice-cream. Continue reading →

Day 1 – De-Turfing begins! – by Callum

Callum My name is Callum and I’m studying History and Archaeology at Southampton University. What I’m most looking forward to about Basing House is using techniques and technology’s that they didn’t have on the excavations in the 60′s. — First Day Morning We set off from Southampton at half past eight looking forward to our first look at the Basing house in the flesh. Continue reading →

Day 1 – Deturfing and site tours

The first day on site is always a challenge. There is so much to set up and to get going. The weather was amazing. Hot, humid, close, and no clouds in sight. Despite this, we managed to put up the bell tent, take an extensive site tour, go through all of the risk assessment and health and safety information, introduce ourselves and even get down to some deturfing in the afternoon. Here are some piccies of our first day. After a morning of paperwork and introductions, we went on a site tour. Continue reading →

Plotting the trench

This morning some of our team travelled up to Basing House to finalise plans with the staff at the site, and to look again at some of the things we’ll be working on while we’re digging later this month. First of all though, we couldn’t resist going to look at the recently discovered Tudor fireplace, found by the building contractors whilst they have been working hard to fix brickwork issues on the standing remains. Continue reading →