ossamenta

I'm in between bone reports at the moment, so I spend my time helping the enviromental department with soil sample processing. We take soil samples on excavations to find remains of charred grains, small fish bones, snails etc - i.e. things we can't find by hacking out a ditch with a mattock (depite popular belief, trowels aren't the most commonly used tools on excavations). Soil samples are also taken from burials. After the skeleton has been recorded and removed, the grave fill gets sampled so we don't miss small bones - particularly when the graves contain infants or small children - possible foetal remains or calcified cysts.

Buckets with soil then come to the processing area, where the environmental archaeologists sieve them through various mesh sizes. Not the most exciting part of archaeology in my opinion, since I don't find charred grains and snails to be that interesting. But yesterday the soil revealed something that made my day: an Anglo-Saxon spindle whorl! I don't think I've ever seen one outside a museum before.

Admittedly not that exciting, but compared to the rest of the stuff that remained in the mesh - 96% gravel, 1% pottery fragments, 2% bone, 1% snails - it was utterly awesome.