Here's some stuff from the beginning of the house building. As you can see, they'd poured a gravel base on the house site, and then we had to dig foundation walls around the edge of that for the concrete to have a good footing. Here's some pictures.
First we dug some by hand.

Then we got a fun tool.

Then the tool ran into some obstacles, mainly the previous house, and we had to do some more hand digging.