Day 4 of excavation: 26 June 2014

Today the project director, Marek Jasinski, decided that as we have more objects than we ever could have dreamed of, we would pause in the excavation of trench 1. Instead, we have dug four test pits of 50x50cm down the slope of the rubbish area. The aim here has been to see where would be a fruitful place to excavate in future seasons, as it’s clear that we have hardly scratched the surface of what exists. Common sense dictated that we would find more objects in the bottom test pit, but that’s not really what we found.

The problem is this. The slope on which we’re working undulates into banks and ditches. Is this a natural feature? Or do the ditches represent areas where holes were dug for rubbish, with the banks being the upcast soil? We think that the grey clay layer marks the sterile layer under the pits, but time and again we find  that this layer has objects in, meaning that pits were dug into it. It is possible that this clay was removed from the slope to make the Falstad pottery and the rubbish burnt and dumped in the pits. Certainly we’re finding evidence of burning within the pits. I carried out a small survey with a coring rod and it revealed that the land is really disturbed all over the slope, although the general picture seems to be that the ditches are more fruitful than the banks.

 So while Ragnhild and I dug the test pits (I found some barbed wire in mine!), Ragnar drew trench profiles and Lena and Mila spent the day labelling, bagging, recording and boxing all the objects found so far (see picture).

One of the themes of conversation today has been the Falstad Pottery. The prisoners worked in this building, and the fruits of their labour were sold by German soldiers in their canteens. I imagine that there might be some local people with examples of camp pottery in their cupboards. The prisoners experimented with colours of glazes and shapes of pots and fortunately for us, it seems that the wasters from the firing process were dumped in the pits, so we have a number of them to study and compare with the two on display in the museum in the basement of the Falstad Centre (see picture).

So, the key lesson learned by us all is that if ever you want to excavate a WWII camp, the rubbish pits are the first place to start!

(Blog post by Gilly Carr)