East Kirk of St Nicholas Week 6
6 to 10 March 2006
Judith Stones, Keeper of Archaeology, writes…
At quite an early stage in the dig the team began to uncover a stone vault in the north-east corner of the excavation area, which must once have been accessed through one of the now blocked doorways in the fine 15th-century St Mary's Chapel - the Third World shop, entered from Correction Wynd.
A closed-off vault is in itself intriguing, but work this week has made it even more so. As the dig has become deeper alongside the vault, it's possible to see that one side of it has been roughly breached at some point in the past. Soon it will be possible to see what the vault contains……
The hole in the vault was discovered by a volunteer, Chris Andrews.
Although Chris has always had a great interest in archaeology, she's never had the chance to do it before and finds it "absolutely wonderful". A classics student with the Open University, she's been coming to dig one day per week, really looks forward to it and finds that the day on site is just not long enough.
Some really fascinating gravestones were found this week.
We've had a number of 17th-century ones - for example the one pictured in week 2 - but this week's ones are very, very special.
One commemorates an Alex Paterson, who died in 1679. The stone describes him as a son of another Alexander Paterson, 'Armorer'.
The other stone records the death in 1640 of Andrew Melville, who is described as 'MR' (Master) Music, and was Master of the Song School within the grounds of St Nicholas Church.
Both these individuals appear in the Council Registers and Chris Croly, Assistant Keeper, Research, our historian in the Archaeological Unit, is finding out more about them - so there will be further details, with photos, in a future week.
The 'engineering' or support trenches, which I've mentioned a couple of times before, are now nearly deep enough - at 1.30 metres.
Next week the contractors will fill them with concrete to take beams to hold up the Gallery, allowing removal of the 19th-century East Kirk pillars, which in turn stand upon foundations of the 15th-century church.
We need to be able to look more closely at those foundations and probably remove them in order to find out what lies below. The trenches have taken some time to dig, because, inevitably they've had a lot of 'archaeology' within them.
One of them has just touched the side of a wooden coffin, which had tinned metal fixings or reinforcements still attached, as well as a group of three copper coins stuck to its surface.
Stewart Thain, our coin expert (see week 4) says that he thinks they are all 17th-century 'small change', but will be able to give a better identification once they've been conserved at Marischal Museum.
Meanwhile, one large gravestone, which has the faint outline of a human figure incised on it, has been removed for storage, with a little help from the MTM contractors, as it is extremely weighty.
It had been used at least twice as a grave cover, but we're not yet sure of its original date -perhaps the style of the figure will help determine that.
