Excavations at the Royal Bull’s Head Inn – Day 1 – October 13, 2014

Today, with the help of the Centenary Heights High School senior ancient history classes, we opened up the first square of this field season at the Royal Bull’s Head Inn. We selected a 4x4m square, positioned with the help of the geophys work that Kelsey Lowe and Aaron Fogel carried out in May, and got to work removing the top layer of grass.

By the end of the day, and some 15cm down, we exposed the top of a cobbled area that we believe may have been constructed to help ease the passage of horse drawn carts, from the road, to the stable. Without this, the black soil, especially when wet, would make it virtually impossible to move around the property in any type of horse-drawn vehicle.

Other activities that the students took part in were sieving the excavated deposit and then sorting the material that remained in the sieve, into like-components. So apart from exposing the cobbled path, we also extracted cultural material such as sheep bone, bottle glass, blue-ware crockery and hand forged nails.

Archaeology can be hard labour. We are always very grateful to our student volunteers: Eddie Thangavelu, Alyssa Madden, Leanne Bateman, Mark Meara, Peter Stainton and Grant Mottram. Also Jillian Smith, Chloe Delaney and Wendy Van Der Spoel. Thanks also to the two ancient history teachers from Centenary Heights Highschool: India Resetti and Travis McMicking, for instilling such enthusiasm in their students. All were a pleasure to work with.