Today was undoubtedly the hardest time for everyone. Not only has the temperature warmed up, but this was our last working day for the full team and there were still many jobs to finish. Angela Gillen worked herself into the ground to finish the trench in the NE corner of the plaza, assisted by our American volunteer Anna. Other people were frantically drawing, or filling out context sheets and cleaning up the edges of contexts to allow them to be planned and photographed correctly. The day did not pass without new discoveries. It is clear now that we have the same sequence of primary paving, destruction/fill and repaving in Angela’s area as we do in the SW corner, where the paving is well-preserved . Observations of surface markings by Richard Sadler revealed that our masons’ marks have been misread – they are in fact xii, xiiii and xv – part of a sequence in the SW corner – which shows that the second phase of paving was laid in one operation. Luke also spotted a gameboard that had previously been missed, though there was no time for a game with our bone dice from week one, and the numerous gaming counters that we have been finding. Axel has been leading the backfilling of the façade.

Luke Lavan 27/09/2008