Thursday, July 19, 2012

A surprising find in an unlikely location

Hello everyone. Sorry for the silence over the past week, I had a small accident with my laptop on my birthday (after too many cocktails) and broke the screen but we're all fixed now! The last week has been a bit mad, despite the weather, with my A Town Unearthed test pits continuing and spending a couple of days getting eaten by mosquito's at the Randell Manor excavation with Kent County Council. I'm returning on Saturday with the Canterbury Young Archaeologist Club so will update you all then, in the mean time they have a Facebook page which is updated regularly; remember you don't have to be signed up for Facebook to access the page!

Whilst we were doing our first test pit the residents of the house two doors down came over and expressed an interest in having us come and destroy their back garden. I went for a quick site visit and found that the garden was on a slope and had been terraced (terraced gardens usually don't bode well for archaeology) but I decided we'd have a look because of it's proximity to the Martello Tower and the Roman Villa. I wasn't really expecting to find anything which is why what happened next came as a complete surprise!

We started by cutting the turf...


...and get stuck in with the digging...



 ...and come down onto the top of these stones. Now I know they look like they might be in an arc and something deeply exciting, maybe even structural, but unfortunately not. If you look again you will see in the right hand side there is a lot of bone mixed in with the stones, there was also a lot of pot, and the stones are laid too hap-hazard to support any weight; definitely not structural. To me this was smelling suspiciously like a fill of a pit or a ditch (when I say fill I mean the stuff that has washed back or been placed into a hole in the ground after it's been cut). It would explain why the stones are jumbled up and why there was pot and bone all mixed in with it. There's only one way to find out what's going on and that's to get it out!....

  
...unfortunately the weather had other ideas and we had to beat a hasty retreat...


...we get back to it on the next day and my suspicions are confirmed when we start coming getting things like this out of the soil...



....in the top picture we have a collection of animal bone (the big jaw probably comes off a cow). Most of these bones have been broken up or shattered to get to the nutritious marrow which was common practise in the past. There is a piece of pottery in there too which has been dated to the Roman period. The pottery above is probably from the Late Iron Age but a good clean up will tell us for sure. We had a lot of sizable pieces of pottery from the Late Iron Age/Roman period which is fantastic news for our project! Back to the digging, if we have fill material then that means we have a ditch or a pit and we need to establish which it is...


...it starts to get a bit deep and awkward to work in, luckily we have a bright young work experience student to get down in the hole!...


...and we finally reach the bottom of the feature (sorry the photo is a bit rubbish). It is in fact a ditch or a gully and you can see it running across the left side of the photo. We didn't have time to excavate the whole thing but we have established what it is, what the date is and which way it's running. The property owners were very supportive of us so I would like to thank them for their patience and understanding when a 2 day test pit turned into a 5 day excavation!

We are returning to Folkestone next week so will keep you posted on all our developments.

...to be continued....

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