Chapter 5: Dig This!

There had been plenty of activity in the valley over the previous few days. Freddie decided that it was time to find out a bit more about what was going on and found his way down from the road and onto the site. Bethany was sitting to one side of the valley, puzzling over a plan of the site. Clegg waved a greeting. She beckoned him across.

"Good morning," he called.

"Hi," said Bethany. "Checking up on us?"

"Just interested to see if you've found your temple or tombs or whatever it is."

"Well, we don't think it's either of those. Do you want to come and see what we have so far?"

"Sure," said Freddie, following Bethany as she led the way towards two trenches at the far end of the valley.

They reached the first. In it, Judy and Stacey were hard at work. Even with Clegg's limited understanding of archaeology he could see they had found a fairly substantial wall. It curved across the trench. Judy was working away at part of it, flicking soil away from the stones with a brush. Stacey was busy scraping her trowel across the bottom of the trench.

"That's the enclosure wall," said Bethany. "From the curve we now know it was about eight metres across. And Stacey is down onto the original surface. It looks as if it was flagged with stones."

"There's no sign that there's anything below this floor surface," Stacey said. I've followed the edge of the wall and its straight down onto the natural."

"I've been getting more Late Helladic pottery from here," Judy said. "The context is good. This wall is definitely Mycenaean. Probably 1400BC give or take."

"So, you're happy. Problem solved?" Freddie enquired optimistically.

Bethany laughed. "Nothing like. We still don't know what it was for. It's certainly not a theatre; they aren't known before about 550BC at the very earliest. This is almost a thousand years older. And there are a whole series of features on the radar beyond the wall. We're going to take this trench back to see what they are. It looks like there are some sort of rooms or chambers arranged around the enclosure. Come and see how Danni has been getting on."

Across in what Freddie assumed was the centre of the enclosure was another trench. Down at the same level that Stacey had been working at, Danni was easing a piece of dirt from a block of stone with the pointed end of a trowel. On the far side, Norah had exposed the base of a narrow column which had broken off about six inches above the ground. Behind her a circular piece of stone showed where the rest of the column disappeared into the wall of the trench.

Danni wearing a bikini top, a pair of very short shorts, sandals and a baseball cap, grinned up at Freddie from the trench. She was fully aware that from where he was standing he had an excellent view of her cleavage. The evenness of the tan that she managed to acquire suggested that she paid as much attention to where she was in relation to the sun overhead as she did to the archaeology beneath her feet. Norah had less room at her end of the trench. Her tee-shirt was streaked with sweat and dust and her hair was full of dust as well. She didn't seem worried.