Читать книгу Turf Wall Architecture and Turf Furniture Assembly Guide - Tanja Trausmuth - Страница 3

Turf and soil removal and storage are one of the most important aspects of archaeological excavation site management (Barker 1993, 129-30; Drewett 1999, 104-5; Collis 2001, 31-4, 56; Roskams 2001, 101-4). Considerable attention is paid by the standard excavation textbooks to spoil management in particular. Comparatively little attention, on the other hand, is given to turf management: more recently published excavation manuals (Drewett 1999; Collis 2001; Roskams 2001) do not even mention it. Only Barker (1993, 129) gives a short description of turf storage in his textbook on excavation techniques, which was originally published in 1977.

When excavating in areas of outstanding natural beauty, uplands or on pastures, turf management and storage are particularly important. Since the trenches have to be re-turfed after the excavation has been finished, with the turf being put over the top of the backfilled trenches, it needs to be stored close to the site and in a way that allows the turf to be put back reasonably quickly and efficiently. Barker (1993, 129) thus recommends quite sensibly that ‘the turf should be cut carefully and stacked, grass face to grass face, well away from the rest of the spoil, and should be kept damp’. For reasons of efficiency, turf is most commonly stacked in forms of walls that extend along the edge of trenches, usually a few metres away from them. This keeps the distance they need to be carried short, and more often than not serves other useful purposes, e.g. to lean currently unused tools against. Particularly in exposed locations, they can also be useful as a shield against prevailing winds and driving rains, especially during breaks taken on site, whether out of convenience or necessity (as e.g. in upland locations far from the beaten tracks).

Yet, not only are turf stacks often rather shoddily built, but their full potential for site operations is rarely fully realised. Given that they normally are built, albeit only temporary structures, and thus have to be properly planned anyway, there are plenty of opportunities to make them into more than just storage facilities for excess material. Planned and used properly, they can help to increase staff comfort on site, improve various aspects of site management and operation, and provide convenient spaces for communication between site staff and, should any come to site, site visitors.

As e.g. Collis (2001, 47) remarks, excavating should be fun and excavations should generally be an enjoyable experience for everyone, whether site staff or visitors, and thus, anything that can be done to improve the experience is useful. In the following pages, we would like to outline a few improvements we have developed in the fields turf wall architecture (turfitecture) and turf furniture (turniture) design. The guidance in the following pages is, of course, ever so slightly tongue in cheek, but we hope that readers will be able to take some inspiration from it to improve their own sites, as indeed some other excavations have already started to do (fig. 1). For ease of use, we include step- by-step instructions for constructing professionally built turf walls (tulls) and a number of pieces of turniture.

Fig. 1: Turf wall (tull) enclosure built at the CADW, MMU and UCLan excavations at Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey, inspired by the Meillionydd turfitecture and turniture (image: Rhys Mwyn).

The turfitecture and turniture shown in the following was mainly developed during Prifysgol Bangor University’s excavations at Meillionydd (Higgins 2014; Wallner & Trausmuth 2015; Karl et al. 2016). Regular updates about the project can be found at our website at http://meillionydd.bangor.ac.uk.