Cleaning the Soil off the Soil

In the middle of the countryside near York, my daughter Emily is digging up a field.

Not just Emily, of course. Quite a few others. Archaeology students from York University, led by some Field Archaeologists (and that's a proper term, oh yes, I'm picking up the jargon).

Now this is what is called Rural Archaeology, which means it's a Field, as opposed to Urban Archaeology which means it's a Town.

Somewhere in this field is a Roman burial, and somewhere else may lie the corner of a Roman villa.

But it's a big field.

Emily's group, excitingly, came across some footprints preserved in hardened mud. Using all their deductive powers they worked out exactly to whom these belonged - - the previous team of archaeologists to dig in that field! - - No, it's not all like Time Team from the telly, you know, where they dig for twenty minutes and find a perfectly-preserved Roman mosaic.

Emily's lot also discovered the previous team's test pit - the first pit that's dug to see what kind of things might lie in a particular piece of ground. In the test pit the current diggers found a Neolithic arrowhead, which taught them a vital piece of information about Homo Sapiens. What it taught them was that even archaeologists can be careless and miss things sometimes.

Archaeologists dig using a variety of tools, from a bulldozer to a very small trowel, depending upon the size of the site and the intensity of its likely contents. Sometimes, if it's a particularly interesting site, they pack the whole site up in plaster of Paris and take it home to excavate it with a toothbrush.

Emily has been using the Trowel and Wheelbarrow approach, whilst some of her bigger and stronger co-diggers have been using mattocks to break up rocks.

"Do you want a hand with that?" asked Helpful Male Student as Emily painstakingly pulled a wheelbarrow full of rocks up a hill. "No, I'm fine!" she said contemptuously (her word) oh no, she may be very slim but she's not a weak girly, no way. So she pulled the wheelbarrow up to the spoil heap and then an interesting moment occurred when she and the wheelbarrow did a strange little dance together before they both fell over and its contents landed on top of her.

To examine the different layers below the surface, archaeologists must make sure that the layers are kept separate. So this means that they spend a lot of time cleaning one lot of soil off another lot of soil. In fact that's what they've been mostly doing all day. Cleaning the soil off the soil in the sunshine, and finding very little, except soil. And a few worms.

Emily was wearing camouflage trousers, a grey vest and a kind of Rhinestone Cowboy hat - excellent for keeping the sun off - plus a lot of sun cream when she arrived at the site this morning. This evening I met her at the station and she was wearing all the above plus a thin layer of dried mud over everything. There is a time for a Big Mac, and this was it, so Emily and I took the mud into Leeds City Station McDonalds and had a good talk about it all.

Tomorrow, of course, I expect she'll find a vast hoard of Roman coins. But even if she doesn't, I think she'll enjoy it.