East Kirk of St Nicholas dig 30th October - 3 November 2006 - Week 40
East Kirk of St Nicholas dig 30 October to 3 November – Week 40
When something particularly unusual or exciting is found on a dig, members of the team often gather to have a look. Hence this first picture, in which several people appear to be standing around watching someone else working!
In the middle of the photo you can see Jack Dunbar excavating the partial remains of a rather fine stone-built coffin, visible in more detail in the second photo, where Jack is facing the ‘foot’ end.
You can get a good impression of how it was built, as a sort of lining to the grave, which had been cut into the ‘natural’ subsoil. If you look just to Jack’s right you’ll notice that the stone behind him looks a little loose – and yes it did fall in! The next picture shows Assistant Director Stewart Buchanan, doing some subtle reconstruction work to ensure a better photo of the entire feature!
We do have some excellent relative dating evidence for this coffin. You may recall that we’ve found evidence of two rectangular east ends of St Nicholas, both built during the 12th century. The coffin was made to bury someone in the graveyard immediately outside the earlier of the two east ends, but then got in the way of construction of one of the buttresses of the later one. At that point the body was presumably removed (perhaps relatively intact as there were no bones left behind), the coffin was partly dismantled, carefully packed with rounded stones and the buttress was built on top of it. Strangely enough, further west, another buttress of the same building (its south wall) seems to have disturbed a second stone coffin, which we’re still investigating.
At just 3.30pm on Friday 3rd, a grave which had been disturbed by the earlier of the two 12th century east ends yielded a little cross on a copper alloy chain, which seems to have been round the neck of an individual at the time of burial. On the site the cross looked pewter, but when I took it over to the conservation lab at Marishal Museum at the end of Friday, the brighter lights there suggested it might be silver. More of that find next week, I hope.
The next photo, a slightly vertiginous view taken from the East Kirk gallery, shows the earlier of the two rectangular 12th century east walls, running from near the bottom of the image to near the top, on the left hand side. Part of one of its buttresses is visible as a stone ‘L’- shape, right at the foot of the picture. That buttress sat at the south-east corner of the church.
.JPG)
The narrower bit of wall foundation running off the picture at the top is the east wall of the sacristy. After a lot of careful digging, we’re now sure that the sacristy was an addition to the later 12th century east end. Of course the large wall at the right of the photo is the west wall of the crypt chapel of St Mary, which lay below the east end of the church when the whole building was expanded in the 15th century.
Of course things move fast on site and the photo above is already ‘history’. The next one shows part of the same area as it is now, with just a small part of the earlier 12th century east end wall remaining at the very top of the picture (showing the layered nature of its foundations rather nicely). We’ve removed the rest of it, although you can still see its ‘shadow’ in the natural gravel subsoil.
We saw the east wall of the sacristy in a previous photo and I’ve referred to that building several times before. All the layers within it have now been taken away, leaving some rather impressive post holes cut into the subsoil – you can see them in the next photo. We’re not sure yet what they mean, though! They might have supported a wooden stairway to reach an upper storey within the building, which may have housed the sacristy - where sacred vessels and vestments were stored and prepared for use in the mass - a treasury and possibly a room for the sacristan.
We’re also getting quite excited about some stake holes, smaller than post-holes, three of them in a row in fact, a fence, perhaps – and some other features in a single area near the north-west corner of the dig. They certainly pre-date an early grave which cut through them and the presence of both hand-made pottery and flints may suggest an Iron Age or earlier prehistoric origin for them. We’re constantly surprised how well prehistoric evidence survives in the City, despite hundreds or even thousands of years of intensive later development.
For further information and comment, please contact judiths@aberdeencity.gov.uk: 01224 523658.
East Kirk of St Nicholas Week 39
