I wasn't supposed to be on site today but called by after lunch with some updated membership lists and drone photos of the trench for Juliet. It started spitting with rain as I arrived and at that moment a mini-bus of youngsters arrived so I volunteered to show them around. They were very enthusiastic but some of their answers to my questions were a little unrealistic. (The house on our site got its water from a water tower? Probably not).
David Pink was busy in the Finds Tent with a very impressive-looking microscope, looking at the edges of pottery finds to try to understand what inclusions the clay had. I was impressed by the fact that with a little help he had almost completely cleared the finds backlog - just two trays left to be recorded:
Over at the Trench I found that it was the usual hive of industry and that a new small trench, as yet unnamed, had been started just to the north of Trench 'S'. I gather that this has been sited on an interesting splodge on the resistivity results and is mainly to give the scouts something interesting to explore when they come at the weekend with David Hopkins.
I then became totally distracted by what for me was a lovely find - a piece of Romano-British window glass in context 1002. I had seen one like it before in the finds in Winchester Museum's repository of finds from the Stroud villa, and window glass usually tends to go with high status. What fascinates me is that you can clearly see how it was made. The molten glass was poured onto a flat layer of fine sand to cool off, with the result that one side of the glass is rough from the sand, the other side is very smooth, and the edges have a teardrop-shaped lip.
School visits tomorrow to look forward to!