SEDGEFORD HISTORICAL  AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECT

Weblog Week 4 (30th July to 4th August 2006)

Naomi Payne

We’ve now excavated 276 skeletons from Boneyard and we believe there is only one more to expose in our current open area trenches. At long last the Old Trench really will be finished by the end of the current season. Mark has been speculating that there’s a building (church?) to the north-west of Old Trench and as we won’t know until we dig it he says he can be right for the time being. As we may well be doing some excavation here and to the north of the Old Trench in 2007 we’re hoping to find out for certain (Reeddam North, anyone?). This week we’ve also found more worked flint from the Upper Palaeolithic in the orange layer beneath the burials.

Following some initial scepticism there has been excitement on New Trench this week as a number of post holes were observed, close to and possibly associated with the footing trench. There are two lines on slightly different alignments and a sherd of Ipswich ware was discovered in one fill. Other interesting finds this week include some faced wall plaster and a (residual) Roman coin, a nummus of Constantine I dating from 335-7 and minted at Arles in southern France.

The interpretation of the Roman site up the hill is developing as we’ve been investigating the purple-black feature which showed up as a strong anomaly on the magnetometry results. We are more certain that we are dealing with an industrial area which is probably peripheral to a farmstead. The magnetic anomaly has a central fire pit surrounded by a system of flues. We’ve been finding lots of burnt grain and the sandy soil has baked red around the flues so we’re pretty sure we’re looking at a grain drying oven. This seems to be associated with a four post structure, possibly a barn. We think the complex is quite late Roman as the coins we’ve found are fourth century. This week we found a coin of Constantine I which was minted in Trier in Germany between 318 and 324. This was found in the fill of another cut feature just to the north which may represent a slightly earlier and less sophisticated grain dryer. Another significant anomaly on the geophysics (which lies just outside the trench) might perhaps be the fire pit for this feature. Over the last day or so we have started to find human bone, apparently within the fire pit of the corn drying oven. We’ll continue to investigate this during week 5.