Day 2

It was a cold morning again at 8:00am when the crew arrived, and after yesterday's hard work in removing the road base, we were looking forward to an easier day of digging, with hopefully some interesting finds. Today's crew were: Jon Prangnell, Tam Smith, Kevin Rains, Alex Wisniowiecka, Sophie Maalsen, Robert Speechley, Angela Miatt, Kira Jeffrey and Michael Haslam.

Our first task of the day was to remove the rest of Excavation Unit 2, which again involved chiseling through the compacted, yellow material to reach our next level. After this we took measurements to see how far down we had excavated, and then photographed the finished results. While we worked Catherine Westcott and Karen Murphy from the Environmental Protection Agency, Brian Sinclair from the Brisbane City Council Heritage Unit and Christine Ianna from the Queensland Museum came by to visit and see our progress.

After Excavation Unit 2 was removed, it was time to begin excavating again. We decided we would follow the natural stratigraphy of the site, which meant that we removed our layers on the basis of a change in the sediments, rather than in arbitrary units (for example, every 5cm). Our first problem was soon apparent when we realised that there were several different sediments that were all at the same level! This was real archaeology at work - trying to understand the composition of the site. In the end we found three different sediment types, which were removed separately as Excavation Units 3-5. We sieved all of the material that was removed from these units.

By the end of the day we had removed quite a large number of artefacts from the site. Most of these artefacts were small in size, and most likely ended up in the site as a fill layer. There were many pieces of broken glass, from bottles and panes of glass, in varying colours. There was also a lot of corroded metal, and plenty of pieces of charcoal. Some of the more interesting artefacts included bullet casings, nails, some pieces of pottery, and burnt wood which may have been remnants of Naval Stores 1, which burnt down in 1987.

We felt that the today was very productive, as we uncovered a lot more of the site, down to about 45cm in depth. Our target is to excavate the pit down to approximately 75cm, where the ground penetrating radar targets are situated. There were a lot of visitors to the site today, who were all very interested in seeing us work and we enjoyed talking to them and telling them what our project was about.

Keep updated on the daily diary to see what we have been doing, or come and see us at the site for a live archaeological experience!!

Hover your mouse over each photo to see what it is all about.