Joy & Frustration in Trench 20: Week 4 Reflections

Bennett Owen (MAFS 2026; Student at the University of Washington, Seattle)

Trench 20 and her mysteries

During the last week of the program, I remarked to one of my classmates that archaeology was a bit like playing battleship. You select where you want to dig without knowing for sure whether it’s going to be a hit, even if you have some evidence from previous fieldwork done on a site. Trenches 20 (where I was digging) and 19 stand as polar opposites, both invaluable lessons about the nature and practice of archaeology and as exercises in existentialism. Trench 20 - and 21, a hint at the finds of Trench 20 - was a great success, featuring robust, well-defined and preserved structures and perhaps even directly contributing data to the question of water use at Lindores; it will almost certainly be re-opened next year and further investigated. On the other hand, Trench 19 found layers upon layers of mixed finds, plastic bottles under what was hoped to be medieval wall, nylon found during the last week, etc., an unfortunately nearly fruitless trench.

Cap of drain? Top of grave? Neither?

Digging in Trench 20 was a true joy and yet also sometimes frustrating. We uncovered large stones which initially appeared to be the drain cover, precisely what we had been hoping to find in our trench, which prompted an expansion to more than double its initial area to document as much of the structure as possible. In the process we found a burn layer and several voids around and under the large stones; while this was extremely exciting, it also impeded progress and forced us to move slowly and carefully, especially when working close to the burn layer. As a result, the work we did was more or less groundwork for next season and data collection which will take some time to bear fruit.

A fundamental fact about archaeology is that for every hour of digging, something like five to ten hours of analysis, documentation, and lab work are done. It was downright tantalizing to be standing/kneeling above a medieval void, with every day of digging spawning new questions that will take time to be answered even tentatively; as a history student primarily, it was a strange experience to be providing effectively raw data that would be synthesized and interpreted by others as opposed to being the one interpreting.

Trench 21

Towards the end of the field school we opened Trench 21, a strip (that looked remarkably like a grave cut) a few meters south looking for a connecting wall or drain, and we found two walls which met at an angle. If we had had any more time, we likely would have opened even more to begin to resolve the complications that arose given the apparent lack of alignment between the structures found in 20 and 21, but that shall come in the future. Furthermore, one becomes very attached to their trench over time, and backfilling it was a sad, meditative, full-circle experience, a bittersweet mix of emotions made more difficult by how much was found and just how much more there is left to be learned, analyzed, and synthesized.

As mentioned, Trench 19 did not have such luck. They found very little, if anything, yet I believe this experience is extremely useful as an example of the other end of the continuum of possibilities of archaeological work from my trench’s incredible fortune. Whereas my frustration came from the lack of clarity and vast range of possibilities still yet to collapse to a few coherent explanations, Trench 19 had little to interpret from the time period that served as the focus of our digging.

The existential challenges of finding something yet not getting to be the group that fully explores it as opposed to being a group finding nothing are not meaningfully comparable, but they do represent very plausible outcomes of the archaeological process. This program was an absolute joy and I hope to have the opportunity to participate in another field school in the future!