The morning was taken up by a general introduction and a lecture on the site and health and safety. As the site is an urban setting everyone was required to wear a hard hat visibility vest and steel capped boots. This was followed by an introduction to excavation techniques which I was already familiar with from previous digs however there were some subtle differences which I needed to be aware of. Before lunch I had the opportunity to do some site surveying and planning. The afternoon was taken up with small finds cleaning and more context recording.

Overcast day but seriously warm. I ran through some level measuring and site planning in the morning but the afternoon was given over to a seminar on pottery dating. And yes, it was a lot more interesting than you would think! Afterwards we did some further finds washing as there was a backlog; but then there always is on a dig!

This morning was spent in the YAT Conservation Lab looking at how finds are processed once they have been excavated bagged and tagged. The lab handles artefacts from several museums and excavations and part of their remit is to stabilise finds so that they stop decaying. We looked at the processes involved in conserving a sword which was heavily oxidised, a musket which had been underwater, and a late medieval wineglass which had damage to its base. We also looked at the incredibly long and involved process of treating wooden objects.

After lunch we were back at All Saint’s Church. The font inside the church was going to be relocated soon so we had an opportunity to excavate the area it was going to be moved to. This involved lifting a few flagstones, some of which were old tombstones and then breaking through into the surface underneath ready for excavation. The main find was the glove of the workman who had laid the flagstones in the very recent past.

At the end of the day a few of us went for cocktails as we were in York, and it was happy hour! what a surreal world archaeology is! Not likely to be on another dig where this would happen so…

Worked mainly inside the church during the morning until the church service began then took time out to do some finds cleaning while we waited for it to finish. During the afternoon, we broke through the hardcore and rubble to a black layer where we found a 1915 halfpenny. So, we know this layer is after that date. No holy grail in sight yet!

The late afternoon seminar allowed us to examine previous finds from the site including Viking and Roman combs, buckles, clasps, and even Viking coprolites. We were told about the ‘Lloyds Bank coprolite’ and what it told us about 9^th century Viking health and diet. One of the nicest finds was an engraved gemstone from a Roman intaglio ring.

In the evening, we were given a guided tour of the southern city wall area with a focus on selected building archaeology. The visit to St Mary Bishophill Junior gave us a good example of how very old buildings were constructed or extended by using material from even earlier buildings. The bell tower for instance shows material from the roman period. It was a good walk and ended up in the pub, naturally!

The day began with a full tour of the church by the church warden, Dr Robert Richards, who showed us all the things you tend to miss when looking around the church. Check out the stained-glass photographs and see if you can spot the man wearing 15th century spectacles.

After that we worked a little more on the area inside the church mainly recording the brickwork. I took some time to do my own photogrammetry survey of the whole site for my research and will be posting the results on this website once I have processed the data.

The latter half of the afternoon was taken up by Arran giving us a seminar on stratigraphy where we made up a completely fanciful history and worked out the Harris matrix for it. This was an extremely useful and fun exercise showing how complex albeit logical Harris matrices can be.

The day finished at 5pm and I headed off toward York train station to travel back home, via the station bar!