Wet sieving of the soil samples collected during the excavation at Trusty’s Hill is now underway at GUARD Archaeology’s base in Glasgow. This is being done to extract every minute fragment of charcoal, charred seeds and other ecofacts from selected soil samples, in order to allow an Archaeobotanist to choose the best charcoal fragments (sufficiently large pieces from short-lived tree species like hazel, willow and alder) for radiocarbon dating, and to assess the assemblage as a whole to better understand what plant resources the inhabitants of Trusty’s Hill used, such as the types of wood they used, the cereal crops they ate and any other plants they may have used, such as for dyeing cloth for instance.

12th June