In archaeology slang, ‘groundtruthing’ is the process of checking whether anomalies that show up on geophysics surveys are real, archaeological features.
After just two days of digging, there’s some really nice archaeology starting to show up and the Venturers have cleaned back the dirt to expose some intriguing features.
In trench 1, the geophysics interpretation had already shown what looked like the wall of a building, including a patch of something less distinct, something like gravel. The question we now needed an answer to was ‘does it actually exist underground, and if it does, what is it how old is it?’
These are questions that can currently only be done by digging, so once the Venturers had finished removing the last of the subsoil, we were pretty pleased to see lots of stones showing up in trench 1.
Heather uncovered some impressively big blocks of stone. Next to her, Amanda and Jenna have troweled back to expose a big area of gravel. And behind them, Roger and Kathy revealed a large spread of cobbles.
Together, they seem to be matching up rather precisely with what was on the geophysics interpretation.
Now that some specific features are becoming visible, and their outlines are getting clearer, the next step will be to clean them up, get them photographed and turned into digital 3D models.
After that, we’ll be ready to strategise about how to dig in (where to put slots and sondages) to try and work out how old they are, and whether they are part of the Anglo-Saxon monastery we’re looking for.
As Lisa said just before we started digging, anyone who is anyone will be groundtruthing anomalies this summer…
