Although it was quite bright when we arrived on site this morning, we knew the forecast was fairly dire. There was not too much water in the trenches although a bit of sponging was required and we had a good turn-out of people willing to dig. In the Finds Tent there was quite a backlog of finds requiring washing and I was very grateful for help.
It looked as though there had been some interesting finds in the 2 days since I was last on site; Helen Mullenger had found some large pieces of the handle, neck and body of what we think was a large cream-coloured flagon. Mark had excavated an object that he thinks was a knife, although personally I wonder like Carl whether it was not perhaps a latch lifter given its unusual shape, such as these Roman ones:
By 1030 we had caught up well on the finds processing and had turned the generator on for tea break when the heavens opened and the rain poured down. Everyone rushed for the marquee. By 1100 it was obvious, as the forecast had warned, that it was not going to ease off and Juliet decided to call it quits for the day.
We had a discussion about ordering some more LA T-shirts because Chris was going over to see the makers and then Carl went to his car to get the microscope because we wanted to test it with the camera. Meanwhile everyone else drifted off home. While it was quiet I wanted to finish washing all the remaining pottery that had been brought back, so with David Bale's kind help as seen below we completed the washing of all the remaining pot in the pouring rain while stacking up the drying trays on the racking in the tent in the probably vain hope that all would be dry by tomorrow.
Carl, David and I had our lunches and then Carl and I tested the microscope camera and found that it did indeed work with my laptop running Windows 10 - but it made us realise how technology has moved on, because a 1.3-megapixel camera looks terribly dated and fuzzy when most phones these days have 8-megapixel cameras. By 1.00pm I had had enough and headed home to dry off!