Over the course of the excavation this year and in preceding seasons a recurring theme has been the discovery of large quantities of burnt flint; as such there are a number of suggestions regarding its continued presence. One possibility is that the flint was burnt and crushed as a temper for ceramic production. Perhaps the flint was heated to assist corn drying, the corn could have been spread over a material to prevent direct contact with the flint, but drying as a result of residual heat; this process may have occurred in some of the \u2018working hollows\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The pits on site could have been used to store the dried corn or for hanging meat; those intersecting the gullies of the round houses could have been used for the collection of rainwater.\u00a0 \u00a0Some of the pits in Trench B would appear to have been packed around the edges large pieces of chalk and flint. \u00a0\u00a0Environmental sampling of the fill of these pits may give an indication of the range of functions that the pits could have had.\u00a0\u00a0 The geophysical survey of neighbouring fields has revealed a continuation of the settlement, featuring many other round houses, if these are contemporary with those found on site (100 BC), the settlement would coincide with the decline in use of hillforts.\u00a0 Does this settlement reflect a move away from hillfort centred communities and a migration of people? If so, what drove this movement and are there any social and cultural changes that accompany? How can this be captured in the archaeological record?<\/p>\n
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Over the course of the excavation this year and in preceding seasons a recurring theme has been the discovery of large quantities of burnt flint; as such there are a number of suggestions regarding its continued presence. One possibility is that the flint was burnt and crushed as a temper for ceramic production. Perhaps the… Read more » about Day 21 – working hollows and pits<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1259,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-11","category-diary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1125,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions\/1125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/big-dig\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}