SEDGEFORD HISTORICAL  AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECT

Weblog Week 1 (9th July to 14th July 2006)

Naomi Payne

The first week of SHARP’s 2006 summer season has kicked off with two courses, Basic Excavation and Recording Techniques and Human Remains, and we’ve had school visits every day, which has kept Christine and various other helpful people very busy.

The area left to excavate on the Old Trench is now very small, requiring only 3 or 4 volunteers at any one time. Several burials of the remaining estimated 15-20 are now under excavation and one and a half of these have been lifted and more will follow shortly. At this depth the grave cuts are visible, which is unusual for Boneyard, and makes sorting out the phasing that bit easier. It is hoped that we will have enough time this season to investigate the Iron Age remains below the Anglo-Saxon cemetery and close down this area entirely. Small finds from Old Trench this week included a particularly nice worked flint.

On New Trench we’ve been trying to make sense of our complex sequence of inter-cutting ditches by inserting a number of slots. It’s becoming clearer by the day (mostly) and we are now sure that the ‘footing trench’ is definitely cut by and therefore earlier than the ditch which runs along the same alignment. Deborah says that the enviro samples that have been taken this week are rich in burnt grains, so she’s very pleased. We seem to have had loads of interesting small finds including a late Anglo-Saxon copper alloy faceted finger ring, a small buckle or brooch complete with its pin, two bone pin beaters, for use in weaving, a fragment of light blue vessel glass and an iron pin.

Up the hill on the Roman project a new area is now being examined in an adjacent field to last year’s work. The 35m by 25m trench was opened by machine at the end of start up week. This year we’re targeting a possible enclosure which was identified during a magnetometer survey last year. The site was cleaned back on Sunday and features identified after which we commenced excavation. A large east-west ditch is the most prominent feature and is thought to have formed part of an enclosure ditch. The possible enclosure identified on the geophysics may actually comprise more than one phase of ditch and we’ll be investigating this over the coming weeks. Lots of interesting Roman pottery has been discovered, and also a few pieces of Iron Age ceramic material.