Well, here we are with the first dig of 2017 and the first report written using the new replacement laptop, an Asus 560UQ. It will be interesting to see how it handles the photo editing for the future uploads to Flickr.
The survey was going to be at a permission we'd not been to since Feb 2016 and, today, we had the increasing luxury of 7hrs 43mins of daylight to play with. The site is predominantly Roman with a small amount of Victorian night waste evident.
The weather was dry and daylight was just about to break over the newly seeded winter wheat. Although dry, the soil was still damp from previous rain and became very sticky indeed! This resulted in several stops to remove excess mud from the spades, wellies and coil bases!
We pushed on using the machines set-up as normal with the large coils and standard GMP mode. This field holds the record for the fastest recovery of a Roman coin, 20 seconds from switch-on. This wasn't the case today as it was a little longer than that, in fact a lot longer at 600 seconds.
The first of 32 Roman coins recovered came from three inches. All the Roman coins were recovered no deeper than four inches. Small amounts of Roman pottery were also recovered with one piece of Samian Ware being found. Oddly, the Samian piece had what appears to be a saw-cut on one edge. Three George V farthings, a Victorian penny, badges and brooches, a tiny bottle and a watch winder from H. Samuel at 97 Market Street, Manchester were other recoveries made today. An Icelandic coin of 1925 and what looks to be a token of 1918 were surprising coins to appear.
Another 4X4 pulled up behind our SV and a chap got out accompanied by three dogs. He made a direct track across the field towards us. I greeted him with a firm hand-shake and introduced ourselves to which he asked who did we get permission from to be there. On telling him he smiled and said that they were his parents.
He asked various questions about the machines and was amazed at how light they were. Funnily enough, we'd just found a rare denarius of Titus and Domitian (under Vespasian) as he got to us so we showed it to him and he was surprised that we knew who the portrait was...Vespasian! He was even more amazed at the age of the coin and that he was the third person to see it for about 1,946 years!
A perfectly round stone, just smaller than a golf ball (40mm), was a find recovered that we'd not seen before. This could be a sling shot or even a large stopper, who knows? I'm sure that we may find something similar whilst researching round stone objects.
Images of the days finds can be seen here.
The survey was going to be at a permission we'd not been to since Feb 2016 and, today, we had the increasing luxury of 7hrs 43mins of daylight to play with. The site is predominantly Roman with a small amount of Victorian night waste evident.
The weather was dry and daylight was just about to break over the newly seeded winter wheat. Although dry, the soil was still damp from previous rain and became very sticky indeed! This resulted in several stops to remove excess mud from the spades, wellies and coil bases!
We pushed on using the machines set-up as normal with the large coils and standard GMP mode. This field holds the record for the fastest recovery of a Roman coin, 20 seconds from switch-on. This wasn't the case today as it was a little longer than that, in fact a lot longer at 600 seconds.
The first of 32 Roman coins recovered came from three inches. All the Roman coins were recovered no deeper than four inches. Small amounts of Roman pottery were also recovered with one piece of Samian Ware being found. Oddly, the Samian piece had what appears to be a saw-cut on one edge. Three George V farthings, a Victorian penny, badges and brooches, a tiny bottle and a watch winder from H. Samuel at 97 Market Street, Manchester were other recoveries made today. An Icelandic coin of 1925 and what looks to be a token of 1918 were surprising coins to appear.
Another 4X4 pulled up behind our SV and a chap got out accompanied by three dogs. He made a direct track across the field towards us. I greeted him with a firm hand-shake and introduced ourselves to which he asked who did we get permission from to be there. On telling him he smiled and said that they were his parents.
He asked various questions about the machines and was amazed at how light they were. Funnily enough, we'd just found a rare denarius of Titus and Domitian (under Vespasian) as he got to us so we showed it to him and he was surprised that we knew who the portrait was...Vespasian! He was even more amazed at the age of the coin and that he was the third person to see it for about 1,946 years!
A perfectly round stone, just smaller than a golf ball (40mm), was a find recovered that we'd not seen before. This could be a sling shot or even a large stopper, who knows? I'm sure that we may find something similar whilst researching round stone objects.
Images of the days finds can be seen here.
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