SEDGEFORD HISTORICAL  AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH PROJECT

Weblog Week 3 (22nd July to 27th July 2007)

Gareth and John

Despite continuing bad weather towards the start of Week 3 we have still had a very good week on the excavations at Sedgeford. A big thank you to all those volunteers who have remained so optimistic whilst I was almost ready to pack up and go home on Monday through a combination of Sedgeford Lung and waterlogged shoes!

Chalk Pit Evaluations

On the Chalkpit field evaluations. John’s trench (Trench 2) is throwing up some very interesting features. So far we have excavated 3 slots through north-south aligned Saxon boundary or drainage ditches. All of the ditches have produced fragments of Late Saxon Thetford ware, but much more abundant is the Middle Saxon Ipswich ware. One of the ditches had a large dump of burnt clay in its upper fill; this is possibly the rake-out of a Saxon hearth or oven. In another ditch a beautiful fragment of dark blue Saxon vessel glass was discovered, suggesting that some well equipped dining was going in parts of Saxon Sedgeford.  Two truncated rubbish pits were also excavated in Trench 2 producing huge chunks of Ipswich Ware pottery. An east west ditch of suspected Roman date has also been excavated in Trench 2 this week; no more pottery has been found, but there are plenty of animal bones coming up.

A Saxon NS ditch in T2	Ipswich Ware from T2
AS NS ditch with burnt clay T2	AS vessel glass from T2
Pits and Ipswich ware in T2	EW ditch under excavation in T2
Skull from EW Roman ditch T2

Gary’s Trench (3) is now almost fully excavated. This trench has revealed a fantastic sequence of at least four intercutting north-west to south-east aligned boundary ditches which must represent one of the main boundaries of the Saxon settlement. Environmental sampling of these ditches has recovered lots of fish bones, and Animal Bones Kris believes he has found a couple of crane bones from the late Saxon fills; possibly hinting at high-status feasting. Terry also noticed these crane bones as early as week one, but no-one believed him when he told us; that’ll learn us! If this humiliation wasn’t enough, in a small portion of trench 3 undisturbed by the ditch digging part of a Middle Saxon kiln or oven was located. Another quite different oven was located to the west of the present evaluations when a water pipe was laid in 1991; so it is therefore nice to see that the present evaluations are finding a similar range of features.

T3 ditches post-exc	Fishbones from T3 enviro
T3 oven detail	T3 oven under excavation

Meanwhile, Holly and the BERT students have been excavating in Trench 5. This trench was positioned over less clear geophysical anomalies in set-up week. As the week progressed a number of intriguing soil stains started to appear, including what look like a number of ditches and a pit filled with charcoal and metal working waste. Who knows what this may develop into next week…

New Trench

Meanwhile on New Trench we have had a week of consolidation. As the last of the dark Saxon layers have been removed, a number of artefacts were recovered, including a splendid Late Saxon octagonally carved bone knife handle (not dissimilar from one found in previous years according to Naomi, and possibly made from a sheep metatarsal according to Kris). Progress this week was helped by a volunteer, David, and his remarkable prowess with the pump, resulting in the Reeddam being completely drained!! Jon and Geraldine are now very excited that after seven years excavation on New Trench we appear to be getting out of the Saxons and into earlier material.

However, the layer that has now been exposed is not the most finds rich in the world; which is why it has been christened the abandonment layer! This deposit appears to represent a post-Roman and pre-Saxon disuse of the Boneyard site and is a colluvium, a dull orange in colour, that washed down in those dark centuries… This layer was also observed on Old Trench in 2003-6 and only produced a handful of Roman and Iron Age pot sherds.

Once this deposit is removed the New Trench team will be able to tell us if we do have any Iron Age or Roman features at the base of the new trench sequence; so watch this space in Week 4…

General excavation shot of NT	Bone comb handle from NT
Abandonment layer	Excavating onto abandonment
When it gets wet we don't stop we just keep on pumping.

West Hall

Meanwhile a small 2m by 2m test pit has been opened up abutting to the eastern side of West Hall house. The opportunity to do this arose as the owners of the house, the Ramsays, are laying a new patio and once this is down we could never dig there again! The earliest feature of the present standing building is a chimney which Pauline dated to c.1600 when she did a full building recording of West Hall house. Interestingly, Pauline, Rik, Anj and a number of old SHARP lags suspect that West Hall stands on the site of an earlier manor house (possibly even one of the Sedgeford manors mentioned in Domesday Book (1068)). The digging of this pit has been supervised by Pauline, Terry and Christine, a flying visit from Anj digging her first dirt in three years! Talk about too many cooks!  At the moment the pit is full of an east-west aligned post medieval wall and drains of uncertain function, but watch this space to see if we hit the Medievals next week…

Human Remains

Weeks 2 and 3 have seen the teaching of the Human Remains courses (Introduction in Week 2 and Further Studies in Week 3) these courses have been very well received and the volunteers wanted their photos on the weblog so here they are. Meanwhile Ray Baldry has found an unusually broken rib.