SHARP - Weblog week1

Naomi reports: A busy first week, with 16 on the BERT (Basic Excavation and Recording Techniques) course, 11 experienced volunteers and a further 9 on the season’s first Human Remains course. Apart from teaching their course, the human remains team have been catching up with the small amount of skeletal recording that was left over at the end of last season.

The BERTs have been based entirely on New Trench. The group comprised a variety of ages and backgrounds, including A-level and university students, Duke of Edinburgh award participants, retired individuals, people with a general interest in archaeology and somebody who has been funded to do the course by the Prince’s Trust.

On New Trench we finished removing the last bit of last year’s backfill to reveal the entire enormous open area excavation – the first time the whole trench has been open since it was first dug in 2001. The major feature to draw our attention is a large ditch which runs approximately east to west. This may well correspond with the infamous “bitch ditch,” which has been excavated on the upper slope of the Old Trench. On the eastern upper slope there are five burials which were observed in 2001, at least one of which appears to be cut into the upper fill of our big ditch. We plan to commence excavation of these next week, in order to establish their relationships with the other features.

Excavation continues next door in the Old Trench… is it really feasible to get it finished this year? Interesting discoveries continue to be made, this week including an Iron Age pit containing charred grain and late Iron Age Belgic ware pottery. This feature is cut by an east-west ditch in which a medium-sized base sherd of (possibly late 1^st century) Roman Samian pottery was found. Several truncated burials are also under excavation.

Gabe and Susannah have led the The Village Survey Team in excavating a respectable six test pits last week. Their most exciting find was an antler awl, which was discovered on Goodminn’s Estate. This was associated with Grimston pottery and may therefore be medieval in date. Another test pit, on Buck Hill, produced a huge amount of pottery, over a hundred sherds from one metre square test pit, compared to the usual 5-15 (out test pits average 70cm in depth). The pottery included Iron Age and Roman sherds, but the vast majority was later Anglo-Saxon Thetford ware and medieval Grimston.

Up in the OVH (Old Village Hall), Megan has been hard at work with our first GIS mapping results. She has kindly given WEBLOG an exclusive plot of Sedgeford Parish showing Glazed Grimston Ware found in Sedgeford Village Survey test pits 2002 – 2004 (so far). See bottom of page. Other activities in the OVH include Ross undertaking Human Remains research, Liz and Pat with the colossal task of sorting out and inputting to database all our material archive and Dave writing up filed walking results and desktop survey recording.

WEEK 1 PHOTOLOG - click each picture for a bigger version

Week 1, 9th July - Friday Site Presentations
After just 6 days of tuition the human remains course members are able to give a presentation to the public	A volunteer demonstrates some exciting finds

We may be in the middle of a downpour but that doesn't stop Matt giving the lowdown on Old Trench	Here at Sedgeford we take volunteers of ANY age! (No skeletons were harmed in the taking of this photo)