In the northwest corner of the trench, a stave-built wooden pail (finds A239A-Q) appeared in the wall of the trench during the removal of sediment to reveal crossbow find A238 (see figure 10 and figure 11). The artifact was approximately 30 cm below the sediment surface. The pail’s hoop had disintegrated and therefore its staves were falling into the trench. The decision was made to recover the staves and bottom of this container. This was accomplished, with the exception of one or two staves at the back side of the pail. Retrieval of those final components must await excavation from the top of the locus, as this was beyond the scope of the 2021 operation.
The upper stratum of the sediment in the trench, and in fact all strata, contained firewood and disarticulated wooden cask components. This material was consolidated into bags and placed into the trench at site closure as described above. No firewood was recovered for study in 2021, since some pieces already were recovered in 2019. The trench also produced four mostly intact wooden casks, which were disassembled and recovered as groups for dendrochronological analysis. This topic was one of the research problems enumerated in the 2021 excavation permit application. Scientists at LU analyzed all of the recovered cask elements, and results of this study were submitted for scientific publication on 1 March 2022. The manuscript is titled “Casks from Gribshunden (1495) – Dendrochronology of Late Medieval Shipboard Victual Containers” and currently is under peer review with The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
Removal of the cask in the southwest section of the trench revealed a woven basket. A smaller woven basket encountered in the 2019 Gribshunden excavation was not recovered intact, at the direction of that project’s permit holder. The unanimous consensus of the 2021 archaeological team was that we should attempt recovery of the 2021 basket en bloc so that the best effort could be made to preserve the container intact. We note that during the excavations of the English warship Mary Rose (1545), some of the woven baskets were recovered complete, and contained items related to the gunners. The 2021 recovery effort was undertaken successfully and the contents of the basket, if any, will be exposed when the conservation scientist and project archaeologists remove the sediments in the laboratory.