Friday 13th June 2014
Today started off with the main briefing given by Miles Russell and Paul Cheetham. Trench 1 still remains to be an interesting feature. The prehistoric or roman square enclosure is parallel to the larger enclosure ditch, which is thought to be Bronze Age in date. This would mean that if the square enclosure is Roman, then the large enclosure ditch would as old to the Romans as the Romans are to us. We have started to sample the southern third of the enclosure ditch, in which several pits appeared in the geophysical survey that was completed a few years prior by student Hannah Simpson. Pits that have been thoroughly excavated in previous years have usually contained ritual deposits that had some kind of strange significance, and the site directors were curious to see if the pits from this site were the same as the previous ones. The pits from this site can also be used to compare the relative date of them compared to those from the other site.
The enclosure ditch that is being dug in sections is producing middle-late Bronze Age pottery from the bottom of the sections, and the fill of the ditch appears to date around 1600-1400BC, which is 1000 years earlier than expected. This would suggest that the Bronze Age site that we have was the precursor to the Iron Age settlement belonging to the Durotriges. There is also a possible Neolithic settlement at the site as well, due to the worked flint and Neolothic pottery found. No entrance to the large enclosure can be seen on the geophysical survey which is odd, but there must’ve been an entrance to it. RBE ditch for the enclosure would have had a bank, but it is unclear about whether the bank was internal or external. It is important to examine the sections of the ditch very carefully, as it can help us to determine from which direction the bank collapsed into the ditch.
Trench 2 was placed where it is in order to pick up some interesting geophysical anomalies, such as a track line and rectangular boundaries that sure supposed to be Late Iron Age or Roman in date. Sections have been placed through these rectangular ditches, and the finds coming from the feature has surprised everyone. The feature looked to be Roman, but it ended up being non-Roman. This is due to the Bronze Age pottery found, as well as flint work and whetstone. Some human bone has also been uncovered, but it was unexpected to find the bone out in a ditch. The bone was partially disarticulated, which suggests that it was either disturbed or somewhat exposed when the body was put into the ditch. The human bone will be radiocarbon dated in order to determine if it is Bronze Age in date.
Across the rest of Trench 2 we are starting to see features/layers that interact with each other. This means that we can work out the chronology and that excavation needs to be more careful. There appears to be a curbing linear ditch that is either cut by or cutting a pit/depression. However part of the curvilinear ditch did not appear on the geophysical surgery, which implies that it is chemically different to the other soil, and maybe resulting from a different activity. We are relying on finds to date the ditch. In addition to this there is a Roman/Post-Roman working hollow that is placed over another ditch.
Once the site briefing had finished the students resumed excavation, finishing off features that they had been working on the the previous two days. Most of the sections of the enclosure ditch in Trench 1 had been finished and the students were starting their sections drawings as well as making sure that their context sheets were complete. The most western section of this ditch revealed a very promising find at the end of the day. Students Richard Smith and Laura Germain were able to uncover a large piece of Bronze Age pottery. This turned out to be a globular urn of the Whitchurch variety, as it had a wiped pattern on it, with a lug that would’ve been used to suspend the vessel from ropes or be used to carry the vessel around. A boar’s tusk was found from one of the sections in the ditch within Trench 2. Also by the end of the day more of the skull from [2013] (2014) had been uncovered
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