Meanwhile, at the castle...

Yesterday's post was the last of my archaeology end-of-term trip photos. We've been back for a week now and there has certainly been plenty to do, even though the students are gone!

First, though... this is actually from the night before we left for Cornwall- Bruce, the executive
director, took the field school students and I up on the roof. It was fun to get
this vantage point again!

One of my big tasks was photos... I'd been taking 100+ photos a day during the dig and field studies, sending the best to Dr. Scott each evening, so when we got back I had to do the same thing for the hundreds of photos I took during our trip. Then, since the students and other BISC staff/faculty wanted access to them, I had to upload them in an album somewhere. After much fruitless experimentation, computer freezes and delays with Flickr and Facebook, I finally found that Picasa worked well. The photo below is from when I was still trying Facebook (to put in a private album and then send the link); it was taking up to a minute to recognize each time I clicked the mouse, so I was trying to save time by multitasking and also editing the next batch of photos on my laptop.

We also had hundreds of finds from Mota Piece waiting for us! Below you can see some of them in their bags on a table in the archaeology room. All needed to be sorted by material (we can't wash charcoal, oyster, wood, or metal; yes to bone and pottery, which is the majority) and then scrubbed by hand with a toothbrush in a basin of water. 

Our washing station outside the archaeology room.

The castle receives many tourists who come to see the gardens, and we're visible to them as they walk by, so it's been really fun getting questions from them about what we're doing. One lady came down to talk to us, and it turns out that she's been volunteering in nearby Eastbourne helping to clean 300 Anglo-Saxon skeletons!

Setting out trays of cleaned finds to dry in the sun. We have
to be really careful to make sure the plastic bags stay
with the correct items, since the bags are labeled with the finds'
location; if we don't have this information, the finds are almost useless.

With the students gone, there haven't been scheduled lectures/hikes/activities in the evenings anymore, so there's been more time to walk around the grounds and read in the gardens:

Herb garden

Magic garden 

Butterfly garden

Butterfly garden

Rose garden

Rose garden

From the Rose garden through the Elizabethan garden

Since we returned I've also worked on and finished an inventory of all the finds from Beechtree Field, the Roman site on the castle estate that we dug last year. It had been excavated several times previously over the last six years, and it was another case of sorting out mislabelled and unlabelled artifacts, creating an inventory spreadsheet, and trying to reconcile the artifacts into some kind of order, despite missing many pieces of crucial information (like the earlier years at Mota Piece, these excavations at Beechtree Field prior to 2012 were done by a different archaeologist whose field notes we don't have and whose methods we don't entirely understand).

Working on the Beechtree Field inventory

Since the conference is coming up soon now, I've been mostly working on that yesterday and today. Nina's away on vacation, so I've re-occupied my desk in her office so that I have somewhere to work. Dr. Scott has no room in his office for me to work and Nina's office is right down the hall, so it works out perfectly. Below is a photo of her bookshelf next to my desk, holding her library of guidebooks that students are allowed to take out. So many places I'd love to see someday :)

With the field school over and my time here ending soon, there's been a fair amount of interest and discussion about who will hold my position next year. I'm in a pretty unique situation this summer because this position didn't exist previously- I asked to come back and it was created. But I've received many questions during my time here about how I got this internship, and some of the archaeology students- both my friends/classmates from last year and the students I got to know this year- have expressed an interest in applying. It'll be a bit more formal since there'll be more than one candidate, and it sounds like I'll probably get to (from a distance) sit on the committee which selects next year's intern. I'm interested and excited to be involved in that process!