EASTER SEASON 2006
Naomi Payne

The first thing to report is the amazing transformation of the Old Village Hall. Hilary and Colin have redecorated and installed new racking and we are delighted with the results (and very grateful!).

Human remains

Several members of the Human remains team have been hard at work in the Old Village Hall during the week before and the week after Easter. Martin, Charlotte and Zannah, Bill and Sophie have continued with the analysis of the skeletons which were excavated last summer and have updated the burial catalogue. Additionally, the report on the West Hall disarticulated human bone has been completed. Sophie is particularly interested in two possible bladder stones from the Boneyard archive, which are very rare finds because they are not usually recognised during excavation. As part of her PhD research she is planning to carry out X-ray diffraction analysis on them to establish the stones' mineral phases and to confirm the identification.

The major re-racking of the human remains archive has been finished, thanks to Kelvin and Charlotte. This has involved rationalisation and putting the boxes into a more logical order. "We can actually find things!" says Martin proudly.

Collectively, Martin, Charlotte, Zannah and Hilary have finished the final version of the paper which Charlotte will present at Gabe's community archaeology conference at UCL on 10th June 2006. The paper will be about how SHARP has developed its academically rigorous courses on human remains which are open to anybody, regardless of previous experience.

Bill has been doing some work on the average weights of human skulls and complete skeletons from the archive and the results have proved very interesting. He examined four individuals, two male and two female, and found that the total weights of both the females and both the males were very similar (skull and entire skeleton). This has implications for our analysis of disarticulated human remains. A significant difference between the weight of male skulls/skeletons and females skulls/skeletons was also observed. If this proves to be reliable (our sample is very small at the moment) it may be a useful technique in establishing sex in uncertain cases. We shall be looking into this further in the forthcoming summer season.

Fieldwalking

We have taken the opportunity to clear the fieldwalking backlog rather than start anything new this Easter, which has proved to be a first-class decision because the weather has been awful. Terry has been working with Bill, Barbara, Ken and Hazel, going through old material and re-bagging and re-labelling, which has created a little extra space. Kev has sorted and identified the metal finds. We've also finished off the weighing from last year, started to archive this material and to produce distribution maps.

Geophysics and metal detector survey

Kirsty, Dave H and Angie C have undertaken magnetometer and resistivity surveys of an area adjacent to the Roman project excavations, which commenced during the summer of 2005. In conjunction, a metal detector survey was carried out by Roger and Steve over the same area. The geophysics plots have revealed a number of linear features which radiate from a rectangular enclosure and Roger and Steve found some Roman pottery (local coarse wares and Samian), a number of Roman coins and a Roman brooch fragment. Two of the coins are 2nd century denarii, the first from the reign of the emperor Trajan (between 103 and 112) and the second from early in the reign of Caracalla (from between 196-198). The other nine coins are all early fourth century nummi, mostly of the House of Constantine.

Gareth and Mark's digitisation work

Gareth and Mark have been experimenting with the digitisation of some of our one site plans, using AutoCAD. The first finished plan looks excellent, it is reproducible and can be printed out at any scale, with various colour co-ordinated layers. When the archive is digitised, we will be able to overlay different plans with ease. Initial estimates of how long the digitisation of the whole planning archive will take extend to over 400 working days, but we expect to speed up as we do more! Gareth also gave a lecture to the King's Lynn and West Norfolk Archaeological Society on the wider context of the Sedgeford excavations, which was very well received.

Selection of obverse and reverse sides of coins

Human Remains Team at work in the newly renovated OVH