Whitechapel Central: Post-Excavation Work Underway

The first few weeks of post-excavation work were very busy and quite varied. We’ve now finished uploading and cataloguing the photos taken on site, which is a really important record of what we excavated. All the information collected on site from each archaeological context also needs to be entered into our database, and Archaeologist Steve White has started working on a stratigraphic matrix of all the contexts, which is like a big flow chart that shows how they all fit together.

Steve, who is based in our London offices at UCL, has also been down to our main office in Portslade for a few days to talk to our team of illustrators about digitising site plans. He’s also been integrating all of the previous phases of archaeological investigation that have happened at Whitechapel Central, sorting through lots of paperwork from various trenches excavated in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018

In the lab, thanks to a gargantuan effort from our finds processing teams in two offices, all finds from the site have now been washed, quantified and boxed. Specialist work has now well and truly started on some of our largest finds assemblages, particularly the ceramic building material.

Over 1300 kilograms (1.3 metric tonnes!) of ceramic building material (CBM) was recovered from the excavation. CBM specialist Rae Regensberg is looking at the bricks, roof tiles and other artefacts from the site. She’ll work out the time period based on the style of the CBM and the fabric they are made from. This is really important for building a picture of the different phases of activity on the site.

This is just a snapshot of the post-excavation work happening for this fascinating site! We'll be posting regular updates about Whitechapel Central as our investigations continue. You can follow along using the hashtag #SceneSettingE1 on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, visit Mount Anvil’s archaeology page, or view all our updates by searching for "Whitechapel Central" here.