Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Is it a wall? Is it a ditch?? No! It's a.......

NB: Still sorry for the strange picture sizes. Still unsure what's going on.

The weekend was spent at our A Town Unearthed Anglo-Saxon re-enactment weekend with Regia Anglorum and we were also undertaking an archaeological investigation over a suspiciously corner-like feature on Jock's Pitch (the field adjacent to the Villa site). If you ask any archaeologist about the field they say 'Of course there's something there! It's right next to the Villa' but up until last weekend nothing had ever been excavated and surveying results had been inconclusive. We were expecting something, but as ever in archaeology you must learn to expect the unexpected!

So we start as ever by stripping the turf and putting the all important sign up....


.....and then stones! In archaeology 3 stones in a line is allowed to be called a wall so we start to get excited....


...and get this out. It's a tile which has been trodden on whilst wet by someone wearing studded sandals; which the Romans were famous for wearing...



 ....and as it's the re-enactment weekend we get a lot of visitors and they all get excited too...



....and then we find some Roman glass (sorry for the unprofessional scale but that's all I had to hand)...


...and then we clean our feature up and it looks like this..


...it's a bit too rough and ready for a wall and certainly not much like the corner we were expecting. Someone suggested the foundations for a timber framed building but again it's a bit too rugged for that. We begin to wonder if it's a ditch. And there's only one way to find out what it is and that's to dig it out...


...and we come down onto this...


...larger stones lining a cut. Now these are placed with a bit more care than the layer above and given their general size and placement we decide that what we actually have here is a drain. Now those in the know would call it a French Drain but if you are a bit like me I'd know it as a soak away; something that did drain the water out of the soil but would have been a slow seep not a gush like a sewer or gutter. It's exact use and date are up for discussion but we are going for a later Roman feature as it cut through an earlier demolition layer. This fits in nicely with the history of the Villa as it was abandoned for a spell in the 2nd/3rd century AD and re-inhabited sometime in the later part of the 3rd century AD....

So there you have it our first foray into Jock's Pitch and we have an amazing result, even if it's posed more questions than it answered. We are in discussion about possibly opening up some more pits to try and trace it's course and see if we can determine it's function so watch this space!

And finally we had this half a copper hoop/ring out of the trench and one little boy asked me if we had found a smile....



....to be continued...

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