Plugstreet Blog

Team Nosferatu gets serious

Friday, August 8th, 2008

	With five days to concentrate on one trench Team Nosferatu finally found serious solid Great War artefacts in the deepest hole on the site. _ Despite having to dig out two metres of fill we uncovered the solid timbers (preserved because previously below the water table) of a trench mortar emplacement, with an exciting live improvised demolition charge for Rod and Gontrand to work their magic on. _ _

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Lehen Mundu Gerra Ikerketa

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

	Aste honetan gure nazioarteko arkeolojia taldea ikerketa bat egiten ari da Messinesen, Belgikar hiri bat Ypreseren ingurumenan. _ Plugstreet, herrialdeko herri txiki bat (Belgikaren hiri txikiena!), oso ospetua da Erresuma Batuan. 1917’ko Ekainaren 7etan bataila haundia piztu zeren. Bataila honetan oso interesgarria da Lehen Mundu Gerran. Ingalaterra eta bere Inperio Koloniala Alemaniaren kontra.

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Meanwhile……..

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

	In the command bunker we are still smiling… It is all going very well and the team are mostly well-behaved!!!!! _ The local TV came out today to interview Martin and Paola about the site – Paola is the better looking and speaks French! Look out for us on a Walloon television set near you! _ More news tomorrow.

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Day 2 – confusion reigns

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

	Well what a day – mystery and mayhem have ensued! _ The `back to front trenchers´ aka Steve R´s crew, found that they´d spent two days digging their trench in the wrong place. Av´s team discovered an amazingly well preserved hand shovel circa 2007! Cheers for that Dan! _ The bunker team found some remnants of trench board, while Chris the gravedigger found an 1898 bayonet. Team Nosferatu spent all day digging the deepest trench in the world and found nothing until the amazing discovery of “the bottle of Messines” at 5.30pm! _ Meanwhile, Team Slither strike again. Bags and bags of finds including webbing, mauser rounds galore, 4 18lb shells, various tins, leather mush with rivets still attached, angle irons and finally a full wine bottle until Gontrand used his chink, chink, smunch excavation techniques resulting in eau de sulphur. _ All in all a good day!

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Day 1 – the beasting begins

Monday, August 4th, 2008

	Well, the rest of the Plugstreet crew have spent the first day on site, after much drinking the night before! _ We now have 7 trenches open and even on day 1 we have had some interesting finds. Of course Team Slither have come up trumps, as we did last year, and despite only starting `Trench 12´ after our usual large baguette lunch, we´ve already found parts of a German pickelhaub!! Just the rest of the untouched German frontline to find in a baking hot flax field! No pressure! _ As for the rest of the group, well we have discovered a few interesting facts about Coops´ biological makeup which reacts unusually to a metal detector (see Facebook for those on it) and we´re all waiting to see Daisy Duke in his hotpants. _ The beer supplies are disappearing fast but we haven´t yet had to resort to the pink stuff! And for those absent friends who couldn´t make it back this year we are all enjoying wedding style buffet dinners of smoked salmon, but we are thinking of you and drinking to your health!

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Plugstreet 2008

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

	Well ‘The Colonel’ has been deployed. Bar takings last night totalled 66 euros but only 6 team members were present!. We are expecting to drink the bar dry yet again!. The Colonel this year is going to concentrate on surveying around the Ultimo Crater in order to locate the other lewis gun emplacements and Company Headquarters. _ The advance party is now ensconced in the Peace Village at Messines. Last evening we hooked up with the excellent Claude at the Auberge and said hello before going off to eat in Ploegsteert. Sadly Claude had just come back from holidays so his kitchen wasn’t open so no moules yet! _ And now it’s time to hit the landscape and get out, meet some of our other key players like the farmer and the Historical Society ready to start laying out trenches tomorrow and digging on Monday. Meanwhile there are tools to collect, geophysical surveys to do and a supermarket run to chase. _ Meanwhile… we say CONGRATULATIONS to Louise from the Peace Village who is a new mum to Dylan, two weeks old! _ We also wish Caroline the PV Manager a good weekend at the Dranouter Folk Festival! Top Brit folk acts Billy Bragg and the Men They Couldn’t Hang are on. Enjoy!

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Approaching Zero Hour

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

	Readers, we are delighted to be able to announce that the project now has official permission for its excavations at St Yvon this summer. The team will be on site for a week in August and will update this blog with news of finds and thoughts as we did last year.

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Zero Minus 3

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

	Three weeks that is! _ We have agreed the trench locations with the farmer and are set to launch our next season of excavation and survey at Plugstreet. _ Once again a crack team of archaeologists and fellow-travellers is set to embark. This year the team includes some new faces, including two more American friends and our first representative from the Republic of Ireland. Kat has a missing relative so joins the members of the team with that particular attachment to the battlefields. We are also pleased to have Rod on board, after his absence last year due to a more modern war. Welcome to you all. _ As we have said before the idea of No Man’s Land is an international venture and so we go on, our common purpose being to investigate something that once divided us.

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Tales of the Bustard

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

	Apologies, dear reader, for leaving you hanging with the tales of the Bustard – our heroes in the rain with only a cake to sustain… Unfortunately the rain meant that we had to work twice as hard on the remaining 3 days to achieve our ends, so blogging rather suffered. _ So, I hear you cry, what DID happen? _ We opened several areas, some of which were blank and one of which had the most marvellous section of trench in it. The picture is here: _ Image Copyright:Defence Estates _ Scale is 1m vertical and 2m horizontal. The stain running along the base of the trench is believed to be the marks left by a rotted trench board. _ Oddly there were no 1914-18 finds, by contrast to the 2006 dig when we found lots of materiel. This suggests that the soldiers were made to clear up after their exercise. _ One find that did turn up was a Prehistoric flint in the backfill of another communication trench. It just goes to show that the archaeological landscape is indeed a palimpsest, layered and full of artefacts stories and meanings. _ Copyright: Defence Estates _ Happily the Bristol students were still smiling when they left us (maybe with relief at leaving) and all agreed that it had been an interesting and useful week. _ We would have preferred to have found more evidence of the use of the trenches but the excavated section does show that the soldiers were digging proper features to the prescribed death to afford head cover and to keep you relatively safe in the battlefield in Flanders or France. Good training? It looks like it!

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