'Unearthed' installed

The weekend up in Birnie, was fantastic. I arrived in on Friday lunchtime. I got picked up from the station by Tania, one of the digger supervisors. She then dropped me off at B&Q to pick up some more materials for the installation. About an hour later we arrived on site. There I saw for the first in my life an archaeological dig in action. I got a site tour by one of the students, named Tanya. After that I just observed and chatted to some of the diggers. The dig day ended with a site overview presentation in which we had a brief update on what had been discovered in each trench that week. After this we left site and had dinner with the group and a birthday party in the evening as it was one of the student's birthday.

The following day, it was a day off for the diggers. There was an excursion planned. I hopped along to see a reconstruction of an iron-age roundhouse as research for my installation the following day. I had an early night as I wanted to get to site one hour before everyone else so I had a moment alone there and to have a good kick-start.
The following day, it was a day off for the diggers. There was an excursion planned. I hopped along to see a reconstruction of an iron-age roundhouse as research for my installation the following day. I had an early night as I wanted to get to site one hour before everyone else so I had a moment alone there and to have a good kick-start.

Sunday morning I arrived on site at 8.15 and had the spot all to myself. It was quite mystical. Eagerly I started setting up the bamboo canes. As soon as I started, I hitted the first problem: "ROCKS!". Although the site has a sandy soil, it also has a lot of rocks, making it quite hard to set-up the canes. Luckily, I got some assistance from Craig. The setting up of the bamboo canes took much longer then anticipated. When the canes where up it suddenly dawned on me how big this roundhouse actually is/was. I was trying to reconstruct roundhouse D, which was located next to where I was setting up. The third problem I encountered was the wind, which made it impossible to tape up the bamboo canes. This is the reason why a project like this requires planning and at least one site visit before, to test things out. On the other hand doing this this way makes you more inventive and puts you actually more in touch with the site. In the end I taped only on the ground. The bamboo canes were the only upstanding element. I used colour-coding for different elements.
Grey and black = bulks, also called sections
Silver and white = archaeological features left in-situ
Light blue = inner post circle of the roundhouse
Brown and pink = Outer post circle and wall of the roundhouse
Other colours = Archaeologists’ movements; with the lines for movement from point a to b and fields for concentrated movements on one spot like digging, drawing,…
It was a really hardcore taping day as the only break I had, was 20 minutes over lunchtime. The process of taping was slower than expected because of the wind, the first time use of gaffer tape on grass and the need of pinning the tape down with nails.
In the end I did not manage to do all of what I had envisaged, but I did manage to end up with a strong composition which reflected my ideas. It was a bit of a creative and partly emotional rollercoaster, but one which ended up being a hell of a good ride!

Unearthed

Installation/Event, 7 September 2008

Birnie, Elgin

With this installation/1-day event Sarah Foqué aims to visualize and explore the connections between the archaeological dig and the interpretation of its finds. The lines, which make up this installation, try to follow the well organized movements of the digging archaeologist into the lines of thoughts of the interpreting archaeologist.

‘Unearthed’ focuses on the big Roman Iron-age round house found on site. It attempts to visualize the process of the dig on the ground and to give an abstract reconstruction of the architectural boundaries of the round house in space.