Winter Musings

One of the YouTube channels that I enjoy passing the time with is Time Team Classics.  The show is about archeologists who are quite expert and colorful characters (and in general very poor dressers as far as TV hosts go LOL!) who go around Great Britain excavating historical sites.  It appears that in Britain you can't swing a cat without hitting layers and layers of past civilizations from the Bronze age to the Roman occupation through the Angles and Saxons and so on and so forth.  That is quite an interesting concept to a native New Yorker where the indigenous peoples left only a faint footprint of mounds or flint arrowheads and a building is considered ancient if it has been standing a mere 300 years.

I've watched hours of trenching where they study the composition of the soil and the building methods of stone piles.  Even without finding bones or pottery or weapons or coins and jewelry they can still tell a lot about a site just by the soil qualities. They can spot the site of a timber building by finding a pattern of dark soil where the posts rotted in their holes.  They can age a wall by finding the undisturbed soil beneath.  They can find a cooking hearth by noticing a pattern of charcoal and scorched clay.  All these subtleties makes me wonder what they would imagine went on here at our site if it were abandoned for two thousand years and they were unfamiliar with our lifestyle.

Here are some of our garden features and my archeological guesses.

Roadside watering hole?
Or elaborate drain?

Simple brush pile or ritualistic sacrifice site?

Gathering place or summer cooking?

Poorly built stone rampart destroyed by invasion?
Water filtration?
Certainly not a garden folly....

Animal enclosures?
Market stalls?

Location of muck pile? that would be a far out guess
Or shady lounge area?

Small scale agriculture or animal pens?

As a parting shot:  Remembering Warmer Days