Some more great news!

The malting excavations has been going on for many years now. As many people know the amount of daub recovered from the site has been enormous, far beyond our imagination when we started. Whereas daub on other sites is rarely recovered and would be classed as a small find, we are bringing it down in wheelbarrows. Over the years the daub is probably one of the most unappreciated artefact type, although there is something magical when you get a piece with finger marks, almost like you are touching the hand of past people.

Finger marks in the daub

More finger marks

Wattle marks in daub

Each year we collect more of it, and with the excavations of kiln 3 and 4 we have had to make decisions on retention and storage. At the moment we have tried to keep all daub from kiln 4, so that we have as near a complete sample as possible. However, we are likely going to need to discard some pieces longer term, as our archive space is not unlimited.

This year a funding application was put into the Society of Antiquaries of London, for the DRIADS project: Digital Recording, Investigation and Analysis of Daub from Sedgeford. We have now found out that the project will be fully funded by them, for which we are incredibly grateful.

The project has several aims

1. Classify and create a typology for the daub: this is a continuation of work done by Ian Drummond, but will go further and try to group the daub. In combination with the context information to indicate where it was found within the kiln it should enable us to better reconstruct the structure.

2. Record the daub: as we can’t keep it all we are going to use the latest technology, as well as age old techniques to record the daub and its features. The aim is for a visual record of pieces that are significant, along with those that we can’t keep.

3. Create a retention policy: going forward we will need to ensure we keep important pieces and as such we will be developing a new policy to help with this material.

   
   

The project will be undertaken by Pete, with help from both Director of Excavations Ellie and also Joe for his experience in photogrammetry and other techniques. Volunteers are welcome to get involved too, as there will be much to do and some new skills to develop, and while the project starts this year we expect this will be a long running project. The results will be shared in a blog after the season, with preliminary results provided at our festival.