As anyone who has worked in archaeology will know: the real work takes place after the excavation. All the samples, records, finds, photos, drawings ect. all need to be sorted, information extracted from them, and turned into a useful form that can later be published. This week I will be taking part in three days where I join in some of the post-excavation work that is necessary when you’ve done digging. This is just a tiny glimpse into the work that is done so please remember that this can take years!

We started off the day by sorting environmental samples. When on site samples of the soil are taken from different areas (known as contexts) and back at the lab (in our case this is King’s Manor in York) they are processed. One of the later stages of the process is looking at some of the stone, seed, charcoal, fossil, plant ect. remains that are from these samples. To do that you sieve your sample and a few different grains and then take whatever comes out at each grain and then sort it by type. You do this by looking down a microscope to identify it and then sorting it into petri-dishes. These are then weighed and the finds recorded. It is extremely close work, breathing too hard can mess it all up, it takes a lot of time and patience but can be important to work out what kind of environment the context was and therefore what might have happened there.

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The afternoon we spent doing one of the earlier stages of environmental processing which is essential cleaning mud (stick with me). All of our samples that were taken from the site in Malton are first floated. This means that we take a large tub of water (it’s more specialised than that but that’s the basics of it) and add in a large sheet of fabric that acts like a filter (think of it like a teabag or coffee filter). The sample is then added to the water and, with the help of hands mixing it up a bit, the debris inside the soil is floated to the top and the soil itself sinks through the fabric sieve. The stuff that floats off the top (snail shell, roots, charcoal) is collected, whatever remains in the sieve (sand, gravel) is collected and all the soil that falls through is discarded. This is all done by hand so is very wet and muddy! It didn’t help that the heavens opened half way through us doing this. I didn’t manage to get many photos because my hands were too muddy (there’s still dirt under my fingernails as I type this) but this is the best I can do!

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So that’s the basics of what we did on our environmental day. The next day will be ‘finds’ so stay tuned for more info when that comes out!

~Amy 🙂