Villa Magna

Area G1, 2-8th June 2008

The first day this week was spent cleaning a corner of last years trench which we intended to excavate a little further, however bad weather meant that we moved inside the granaio. We had a couple of aims in mind when deciding to open the trench inside the granaio, one was to confirm the eastern limit of the cella vinaria, which was fully excavated last year as far as the outer wall of the granaio, the other was to investigate what, if anything, lay further to the east.

We were surprised to realize that it was possible to break the concrete floor inside the building with a pick axe and that we didn’t need to use a jack hammer to open the trench. The next few days were dust filled and tiring as we picked our way through a horrible c60cm thick layer of concrete rubble wearing masks and goggles, although we were pleased to be inside whilst everyone else was rained off. The pain was worthwhile as we very quickly came down onto the archaeology.

We exposed the eastern wall of the cella vinaria as hoped, just visible running N-S in the western corner of the trench, we also revealed that the E- W wall continued to the east, enabling us to establish the presence of another room beyond the cella vinaria. The return of this wall was also exposed in the eastern part of the trench. We thought at first that the wall ended and started again, but we realized that it was more likely that it had been cut, this should become clearer as we excavate furhter In the rest of the trench we excavated 19th century stratigraphy associated with the construction of the granaio. A cut had been made through the foundation clay for the Roman room to create a drain for the granaio which we excavated revealing further stratigraphy mostly consisting of further layers of clay. The aim for next week is to finish excavating the drain so we can move onto the earlier layers.

— Janine Young· Jun 12, 17:25