Day one - Tuesday 07 May 2013

Today has been the first day of our very exciting and long anticipated 2013 dig at Berkeley Castle. We are now in our ninth season of fieldwork and our aim has been to build up a detailed picture of the history and archaeology of the castle and the associated settlement of Berkeley. Luckily for us, we have had some beautiful sunshine today which was a marked contrast from the rain and hailstones that heralded our arrival last year! This morning the first years embarked on Dr. Stuart Prior’s tour of the castle, while the second and third years spent their time unloading equipment and building wheelbarrows.

Students working hard in the paddock

The first day will generally involve a lot of trench tidying, which means weeding and cleaning the trenches up ready for excavation. There has also been geophysics going on in the Jenner Garden, assessing any further potential for interesting archaeological features. This dig signifies the end of a year’s worth of hard work for the archaeology students of Bristol and gives them the chance to put into practise what they have learned during their time in the classroom.

Geophysics in the Jenner Garden

We have also set up Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as this blog, to keep everyone updated on the progress of the dig this year. This is all part of a new and exciting social media project which aims to promote the dig and engage as many people as possible with what University of Bristol is doing at Berkeley. We will be taking pictures and conducting interviews with staff and students throughout the four weeks we are here. These will be posted to our blog periodically and will give some excellent insights and information into the excavations taking place. Please feel free to leave any comments or questions below; we would love to hear from you!  We have some really exciting archaeology to uncover this year, so make sure you ‘like’ and ‘follow’ our pages on Twitter and Facebook to get the latest information on what we find and how the dig is progressing.