hey Rhiannon, i saw the thread warning not to miss the show the other day and yeah' i'm glad i saw it too.
isn't it amazing how Archaeology has changed in forty years though? christ, back in the sixties i should imagine every ancient site was (metaphorically) quaking in its boots. it was like... "HERE'S A HILL, LET'S DIG A FUCKING GREAT BIG HOLE RIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE OF IT!!"
not to mention the backfilling process, shit, you would've thought that at least one person on that dig knew that compressed earth/chalk expands by at least ten percent after being dug out of the ground wouldn't you?. what they perhaps should've done was to re- fill in layers of say one hundred millimetres a very compactible material such as scalps or even very fine crushed concrete (i know what you're thinking but compacted crushed conc is fucking effective) and then whackered thoroughly the entire area and so on until it became impossible physically to 'Whack the ground, then possibly fill with a super strong mortar mix that dries rapidly and ram right into the remaining gap up to the ceiling effectively underpinning the section of the hill that had been raped...i mean excavated.
it's fucking ugly especially a concrete alternative but to just run dirt to the end of the tunnel and back-fill that way was - and they must've known it - woefully inadequate.
thing is, ugly as my underpinning (not actually but certainly the same outcome) idea is, isn't it just as ugly to fucking hammer away at her without a care for her future...desperate...the fuckers.
kinda feel a bit daft talking building processes with you. blue skies x