20th November 2014, 02:16 PM
P Prentice Wrote:how about a sneak preview of this - it sounds nationally important?
I'd say the stuff we got is regionally important with wider impact on past and future excavations in this area.
Difficult to preview...its a little in the heads of a bunch of people: pottery experts, older experienced digger's PO's etc. I'm writing a monograph for the two pipelines with our three settlement sites in question......however, being on pipelines, each site was the classic...'narrow area of investigation through an obviously larger area of activity'.
Still waiting on final pottery analysis and final radiocarbon dates and the projects are still under client confidentiality but can swap site plans etc via private message if you like (and promise not to publish them until we have! grin).
But in Summary the main site is 10m wide slice through some 150m of settlement with enclosure ditches, 'cess pits', SFB's, A timber structure, a pit rammed with metalworking waste/ off-cuts etc, a handful of keys, antler combs etc, lots of plain handmade pottery, bucket loads of animal bone....dating so far includes Early Bronze Age pits, Mid-Late Iron Age burial, 2xIron Age/RB ring gullies, a layer of RB soil sealing one bit, Very Late Roman pit and ditch, then 5th-6th, 6th-7th, 6th-8th, 7th-9th century radiocarbon dates across the site.
The word we used on site was 'busy'
The other two sites were smaller comprising two morass of intercut ditches and gullies ranging in date from 6th-7th to 7th-10th with plain pottery animal bone and a few other finds.
The impact will be by the end of it we will have some securely dated assemblages of plain pottery (not from deposits of a mixed date - so limiting the chance of it being naughty Iron Age/RB pot that has been re-worked).
Though it has been well know for ages that this pottery can be early medieval, so it wont be a surprise for many.