'Love the Past' talk

DORSET DIGGERS 'LOVE THE PAST' TALK

Come along to Stratton Village Hall to meet Nessie Fairhair, who will give a talk on the Anglo-Saxons on the 7th of February at 2pm. Tea/coffee & snacks will be available. Members free/non-members £5.  

 

Happy New (Digging) Year!

 

We are all looking forward to the 2026 digging season here at Dorset Diggers. Our next trench will be over one of the house platforms that we believe to be constructed of stone and we also hope that other features will turn up. Last season our small 2m x 4m trench, as well as metal detecting, brought up metal and pottery by the tray load! 

We are also looking forward to the reports on the age and fabric of our 2025 pottery samples, as well as the soil samples we bagged up, which will allow us to reconstruct the immediate environment of the DMV several hundred years ago.  

Keep looking in to find out how much more archaeology we can uncover in 2026.  

AGM 2026

 DDCAG AGM

17th January 2026

Stratton Village Hall @ 2pm

Come along (if you live in Dorset) and see what the Group have been up to in 2025 and what we have planned for 2026. Coffee/tea and snacks will be available! 

 

Waddon update

 

As you saw in our last post, our volunteers were cleaning the ground and they found a nice cut that had gone through the natural stone layer. Here you can see the depth of the cut clearly. The trench was located over a geophysical survey result and it proved to be this ditch. Further research will need to be done to date this feature. Could it be the proof that an Iron Age hillfort was repurposed by the Roman's?  

 

Windy Waddon

DDCAG members are helping Bournemouth University to unearth more information about the site of Waddon Hill, a Roman barracks and possible Iron Age hillfort. Three test pits are being opened to look for features and dating evidence. It is a very exposed site, but our intrepid diggers are unfazed!  

Cleaning up the natural stone. 

Some dating evidence? Hopefully.

Neat excavation work is vital.

Nice view from the 'office'.

More work will be done over the next few days. Look in for more news on this interesting project. 

 

Touch the Past

Dorset Diggers Community Archaeology Group

 presents 

 TOUCH THE PAST 

 a talk by CHRISTOPHER J. TRIPP BA (HONS) MA 

 Stratton Village Hall, Dorchester , DT2 9WG 2pm, 15th November 2025

 Chris Tripp founded Dorset Diggers in 2012 . He has helped local people discover their heritage through hands on experience of archaeology at locations in Dorset: Nether Compton, Maiden Newton, Stalbridge and the Isle of Purbeck. Chris will talk about the work of Dorset Diggers and lead a handling session of the latest finds from a Deserted Medieval Village in Purbeck. Chris is an award winning archaeologist with decades of experience in Community Archaeology. He graduated from The Institute Of Archaeology (UCL) in the 1980’s, then worked with MOLA ( Museum Of London Archaeology ) where he started working in community archaeology. He won The Culture, Media and Sport Award for The Best Schools Project in 2003 . 

 DDCAG Members : Free Visitors : £5 

 RSVP : media.dorsetdiggers@gmail.com

No If's But Butts

Last year, in our 5m square trench, we had a series of intercutting small ditches running east-west. This year we confirmed that these ditches have butt-ends, or if you are posh, termini. 

The thing is, that in archaeology it is the features that count, with finds being used to date them. Finds are okay in themselves, but it is the context in which they were found that is of interest to archaeologists, as they have been constructed by people when setting up a settlement. 

When these not very exciting looking features are all dug they will allow us to understand how the village was set out several hundred years ago.