From the rabbit of Caerbannog, to Frank in Donnie Darko and even the scarey rabbits in Watership Down, evil bunnies are a well-known trope.
For us archaeologists, today is all about bunnies. The question is, just how bad have they been?
Today we’ve got a brand new team of Venturers; Vicky, Tim, Sara, Rosie, James and Edwin have joined us from all over the UK… and the world (g’day Rosie! Hola Xose!)
In the heart of the abbey refectory, bunnies have been burrowing below ground.
It’s up to Xose’s team to find out just how far the worrisome warrens extend and to assess just how bad the potential threat to the foundations of Leiston Abbey’s refectory building is.
Xose’s is running his team as a very smooth operation. Following on from laying out the trench on Day One, Vicky takes on the job of mattocking:
Vicky rocks the sunglasses – vital for keeping dust and sunlight out of your eyes.
Xose clears Vicky’s spoil with a half-moon hoe (or a ‘whale-tail’ as it’s affectionately known).
Xose showing us how to use a half-moon hoe.
And Jules checks for rabbits…
Don’t go down there Jules… you might not come back!
By the end of the day, Xose’s team have made it pretty clear just how much damage the bunnies have done… and you can see it here in 3D!
Meanwhile, Tim and Joan are rocking the dry sieve to make sure we don’t miss any finds.
Joan and Timothy make a great team.
Vicky pipes up with a very good question:
Where there’s bioturbation, are we more likely to find stuff higher up or lower down?
In answer to Vicky’s question, both! The bunnies are churning up the soil, bringing things down from the surface and churning stuff upwards from lower down. It means we’re likely to find quite a lot of things, but not in the ‘right’ order and not in their original archaeological context.
And, right on cue, Joan and Timothy find something in the dry sieve…
We know it’s not REALLY a bunny fang, but sometimes you’ve got to let your imagination run wild…
There is another reason for investigating this trench, but we’ll come back to that another day, once we’ve got bunnies off the brain!
“Possible” gatehouse trench
Moving on from the bunnies, another work crew is over by where an ancient footpath meets a massive ditch. They’ve opened up three test pits along the length of the ditch.
From left to right: Sara, Rosie, Edwin and James posing like rockstars for their album cover!
There are two reasons for opening test pits in this area: a) it’s the second ‘possible’ location in which we might find the missing gatehouse, and b) we’re hoping to recover finds that archaeologists who did some excavations closer to the abbey in the 1980s might have missed.
At the time, the archaeologists were just doing a bit of “wall-chasing’ around the back of the abbey – that means looking for additional remains of the ruins that might extend underground. They weren’t too concerned with finding artefacts, and took all the spoil from this task and dumped it down by the ditch. We’re hoping to recover anything they missed by excavating and sieving the spoil. Sure enough… the team soon finds a promising clue:
Such a big key… but what did it open?
In all reality, it’s probably not the key to the missing gatehouse… we’ll just have to wait until our finds expert arrived to help us work out when it was from.
Glen and Tom do geofizz!
Glenn marking out the grids for the new trenches where we’re hoping to find evidence of the missing medieval infirmary.
All this time, Glenn and Tom from ABHeritage have been getting on with geophysics. They’ve been laying out grids, and walking up and down the fields with their equipment, making a survey of what lies underground that we can’t see, and mapping in the location of two new trenches where we’ll be looking for the medieval infirmary. Exciting stuff!
We’ll get the results tomorrow… we just can’t wait to see what they’ve found!
