Wednesday, August 22, 2012

The Lyminge Open Day

My final post about Lyminge is about the open day which I lent a hand on. It was the hottest day of the year, so luckily most of us got out of digging! I was in the shade minding the 'Little Dig' where children (aged about 6-12) can have a go at finding some real Roman finds in our lovingly constructed 'Roman Villa' sets which are then filled with sand.....


...and the kids can have a go at finding the finds. There is also a wall (that occasionally sheds bits of stone to confuse us) and a mosaic to uncover...


...and then we have set up a reference table, also full of real Roman finds, that the children can compare their finds to and figure out what they have been excavating...


...and everybody learns something through playing in the sand....

..and someone managed to take a photo of me doing some work for once (credit to Alex for the photo!).

All in all everyone had a great time, despite the very warm weather. Regia Anglorum were there too and there are more photos on the Lyminge blog.

That's all from my Lyminge adventure. Again I'd like to thank everyone there for being so nice and letting me come in the first place. Here's hoping I can come back next year!


...to be continued...

Lyminge Church

I was fortunate to have a quick tour of the church and the bell tower whilst in Lyminge. The church is dedicated to St Mary and St Ethelburga and was initially constructed in 633AD and made up part of an Abbey (the history of which is below). There are many later additions and alterations, such as flying buttresses added in 1277 and the tower was added in the 15th century, but all in all it is a very interesting and pleasant little church!

The church was constructed around 633AD when Ethelburga, widow of Edwin the King of Northumbria, returned to her family home, which was then controlled by her brother King Edbald. Edbald gifted Ethelburga a ruined Roman Villa at Lyminge and began the construction of the double minster where she was appointed Abbess. She is mostly remembered for famously converting her husband to Christianity and remained dedicated to the faith until her death in 647. 



Here is a photo of one of the three arched windows in the Chancel. According to the guide these are 10th century windows and the red tile you see is Roman, most likely taken from the ruined Villa complex. The leaflet provided by the church also suggests that the Nave and Chancel may have been built upon existing Roman buildings and they kept the foundations and lower parts of the wall intact.



Here is the impressive flying buttress built in 1277. Flying buttresses are designed to help support buildings exposed to large forces, such as wind or the weight of stone vaulted ceilings, and are mostly seen on Cathedrals and other such large buildings. Without the buttress the weight of the walls and the forces acting on them push them outwards and they collapse, with them the walls can be made thinner allowing for windows and stained glass to be inserted.


This is the tower at the West end. We went to the top and some of the braver souls went up further to the flag (not me I'm a bit nervous of heights). The tower is 15th century and has the narrowest spiral staircase I've ever seen in my life! We stopped half way up for a look at the bells and it chimed 4pm while we were up there. There are 8 bells and they are dated 1631, 1727, 1759, two from 1785, 1810 and two from 1904. I believe the older bell is now listed.



Some views from the bell tower. The red brick building on the bottom photo is the Coach and Horses pub and the excavation is just behind those trees to the back.

So there you have Lyminge church. It is well worth a visit of you are in the area (as is the Coach and Horses!).

...to be continued....

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Lyminge......

I've just spent the last (extremely hot!) week in Lyminge on the University of Reading excavation (run in conjunction with Canterbury Archaeological Trust and Kent Archaeological Society). There is a blog updated regularly on the finds, features and excavators if you want to read about the details; I'll only be doing a quick run-down below so if you do want more information then you'll find it there.

Excavations in 2008-2010 were undertaken near the church (more on that below) to attempt to understand the changes that occurred during the conversion to Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon period. There is documented evidence for a double monastery (one that has mixed sexes and was presided over by a royal abbess) and the excavations in this first phase successfully located the domestic buildings associated with the monastery (with a date of around the 8th century). Excavations uncovered evidence of the domestic section a pre-Christian (late 5th century - early 7th century) royal complex, or villa regalis. Nothing like this has been found in Kent so these discoveries are re-writing history as we know it!

So that was a whistle-stop tour of the last phase (more information on the website) and now Phase 2 is underway. This new phase, which is set to continue until 2014, is centred around Tayne Field and has already turned up a Saxon hall, set to become one of the largest in the country, a Sunken Feature Building (SFB) - more on that later -, countless Norman cesspits, and a number of later medieval field boundaries too!

So let's crack on. I took some photos (more are on the blog!)....



...as you can see from the photos the trench at Lyminge is a little bit larger than the test pits I've been handling at Folkestone!...


...this is a view of the SFB (sunken feature building). The commonly held theory - although it's been coming under fire recently - is that these buildings had a sunken bottom and had wooden planks laid above which made up the floor. They are almost always Saxon in date and this one is no exception. Quite often they are associated with a certain purpose, such as weaving or storage, and are back-filled with rubbish when they fall out of use; although some of the 'rubbish' that has been coming out of this SFB has been very impressive indeed!...


....here you can see the SFB mid-excavation. The bits sticking out of the sections are pieces of animal bone but pottery and other exciting finds have come out of here; check the blog for more details. Anyhoo, I was assigned a funny shaped blob to investigate, with my eager assistant Sophie, and after a bit of a clean up and furtle we turned it into this....


 
....a pit and a smaller linear feature next to it. Both producing similar sorts of finds so possibly contemporary with each other. These are a bit later than the hall and are of an Anglo-Norman date (around the 12 century); there are a lot of these sorts of cesspits all over the site, some of them 1.8 meters deep! We go down further (Sophie is sat in our hole to the right and Rosemary is stood in her pit on the left)....


....and pick up pot, shell, charcoal, daub...the usual rubbish they would have thrown in on top. Samples will be taken from this feature and processed by flotation. Flotation is a very simple concept, basically the sample is submerged and all the interesting bits - like seeds, grains, bones - float to the top and are collected. From this we can re-construct the diet of the people who used this cesspit and so far other pits are producing fish bones, along with the seeds and grains. It may sound a bit grim but these pits are 1000 years old! 

And that's as far as we got in my brief visit to Lyminge. Sophie will continue following the cesspit down so good luck to her! Some of us were lucky enough to get a tour of the church and I helped on the Lyminge open day so will update you on those soon but I would just like to say thank you to the organisers, supervisors, and the people of Lyminge for letting me come and dig, and for being so welcoming!

...to be continued....

 


Saturday, August 11, 2012

The next two test pits get ticked off...

The next two pits were less exciting than the others have been so far so I've grouped them into one post.

Our first was done at the start of the week and was in an area where we were expecting nothing...and nothing is exactly what we got.

Although there were some young residents of the garden who were fascinated none-the-less...



...even if our best efforts couldn't produce a fully armoured and armed Roman Centurion. All we found was a disappointing plank of wood that looked suspiciously like a scaffolding plank...


...and it was obvious to us the garden had been built up, probably during the construction of the house, and we couldn't go deeper than we had due to health and safety requirements. That doesn't mean to say there isn't anything buried underneath the built up ground though.

Our next garden was just as devoid of archaeology. We started off digging up the vegetable patch...


...and found a piece of carpet!..


...but what was more surprising was what was underneath the carpet...


...and that was the remains of a pet dog! It's in the edge of the section and I have decided to leave it in peace. Other than that the trench was very similar to the previous one with built up ground full of modern detritus.

Never mind, we have more on the way!


...to be continued...



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...

Saturday, August 4, 2012

The next property done and dusted!

The next property was a bit different again. We were fortunate to be in a garden which was mostly lawn and larger than the previous places we'd excavated. The owners were more than happy for us to dig as much as we pleased and so we began opening up pits..


...I gained a new assistant supervisor...



...and we enjoyed a break in the sun...


...but we didn't find any archaeological features. We had some layers with Roman and Iron Age pottery, much like in all of the properties along this road but no ditches or pits like before. Although our time at the property ended the owners wanted to continue digging so some of my volunteers went back for a few more days and found this in the back fill of one of the test pits...


...an Iron Age brooch! Very nice. I believe it to be from around the 1st century AD (roughly used around the time of the Roman conquest in 43 AD) and it is made of Bronze. If any one has any more info then please do share in the comment box below.

And that concludes our 4th property. We had a total of 7 pits in the end which I think is a new record for the A Town Unearthed project!


...to be continued...