The stuff of nightmares

There are so many things to talk to you about today, I'm not sure where to begin. We all know what nightmares are and for some people these are based on very real phobias. Some people may be scared of heights, or snakes, or spiders, for example. Working on a beach, there have been a couple of occasions where I have shifted a piece of earth, only to see a crab scuttle out. I'm not afraid of crabs, but that sudden movement takes you by surprise. Needless to say, I jumped about 10 foot in the air before realising it's only a crab! I don't mind looking at them, or shooing them away, but I would rather not touch them. The rest of the team find this hilarious! So, they are now on a mission to get me to hold a crab...

I feel it is probably about time that I introduce you to some of the team. Here are some of the students enjoying fresh mandarins in their tea break, yes, it's a tough life. From left to right we have Noortje, Rockim, Finn, Rosanne, Marsha, Akima, Mia.

So, why did I begin this blog talking about nightmares? There are some nightmares which all archaeologists experience at one point or another. Many of them are more annoyances than nightmares, such as when someone walks across an area of ground that you have just painstakingly cleaned ready for photographing. Today, we had a minor drama, that really is an archaeologist's nightmare, part of our section collapsed. The wall of your trench is called a section and this needs to be as vertical as possible. This is so that accurate measurements can be made of the various levels and features which can be seen. When a section collapses, it is potentially very dangerous as people can be injured or even killed. In our case, it was not a deep section, and luckily no one was injured. Why did the section collapse? Well, that's to do with physics and geology. Basically, the lower parts of the section were fairly soft sand, and the upper part had the fairly loose soil deposits which had already slipped down to the beach level. The deeper we excavated into the sand, the more we destabilised the structure. The weight of the upper deposits then became too much and the section wall collapsed.

I mentioned previously that we started digging on the foreshore as a rescue dig because the main site had slipped down from the top of the cliff. Now we have excavated, we can see this whole process in the sections and profiles of our site.

In the foreground of the image, you can see that the cliff is fairly vertical. However, the further you go towards the beach, the more the angle changes. Not only does the cliff slope down towards the beach, but gradient of the cliff face also changes. Then, on one hand, we have the sea eroding the bottom of the cliff and on the other, heavy rains combining with the clay-rich soil increases the weight of the upper deposits. The heavy soil weight, the stormy weather, the angle of the cliff face, and the erosion of the cliff, all combine to destabilise the land. Eventually, the land slides. From our sections we can see that this was not a one-off event, it happened several times. This is making interpretation of the site very complicated because some of the layers are becoming jumbled. However, we are now at the stage of recording the site. This we do with a combination of photographs, measurements, and drawings. Then it will be all hands on deck to tackle the main site.