A Ditch in Time...

 

Despite the terrible conditions our valiant volunteers managed to do some sterling work on the E-W ditch yesterday. We are nearly done digging the sections through the fill and then recording can be undertaken. Drawings and photos can be created and levels taken. Some more pottery was unearthed and these will allow us to date the feature, but I would be surprised if they were not medieval. 

The theory at the moment is that this ditch was created to produce enough earth to build up the ground so that houses could be constructed above the wet surrounding landscape. 

The geophysics shows that a S-N ditch butts up to the E-W ditch (the darker thick lines) and the houses would have been constructed in the lower left and lower right of this image. Like the rest of the DMV to the East they would have faced the holloway to the south. The area to the North is very boggy and it would probably have been so in the medieval period too.    

Our first ditch!

The drainage ditch has worked very well and although we had to bail-out the dug features 90% of the water had run off down the incline, as planned.  

Once we had then cleaned the base of the trench we could see the linear feature running west-east. We started cutting slots and now have some nice sections to draw along its length. Importantly, we have some pottery fragments that will allow us to date the ditch. 

Although the conditions are challenging we also found another feature, but it is amorphous, so we will have to investigate this one later. 

We are now hoping that the rain will break for a few days (for a few weeks?) and we can continue to investigate the lives of the medieval people that once lived on this spot.  

   

All going swimmingly...

As you can see, we had the swimming pool problem again. So we have dug a drainage trench in one corner that runs down to the nearby pond and...

 ...success! We can now plan to dig the features and expand the trench soon.   

 

Potastic!

The good news is that we have managed to find some nice sherds of pottery from our first foray into looking for the DMV. Mostly Early Medieval, but also what looks like a couple of BBW sherds too. The experts will undoubtedly tell us more. 

 

Jolly fine boating weather...

 

Although the weather has been very wet and the underlying material is clay, we have found that there is a linear feature cutting the pink clay material and may be a surviving part of the surrounding ditches that were dug to make the house platforms to keep them above the wetter ground. 

However, when we turned up on site last Wednesday the trench had turned into a swimming pool! The forecast is for more wet weather for the next several days, so we may have to wait until the following week to return to work. 

First Features

At last! We have started excavating the non-scheduled DMV. However, the geology is clay, the archaeologists Nemesis. When dry it turns to concrete and when wet it can turn the trench into something from WW1. However, we can't choose to just work on nice soft stratigraphy, so on we go. A possible linear feature turned out to be a dud, but the orange clay and dark features are looking interesting. Once these features are excavated, interpreted and recorded we will expand the trench to 10m x 10m. Keep looking in for more news on this rare opportunity to research a DMV.  

 

DMV update

 

At the DMV site today we opened up a 2m x 5m trench and pottery started to come up very quickly, along with some features. 

So we then expanded the trench to 5m x 5m.

We then cleaned the base of the trench to highlight the features, these being a possible linear feature, two burnt clay areas and a dark semi-circular patch with concentrated charcoal inclusions. 

Considering that this is primarily supposed to be a medieval site these pottery examples look very early, but we will let an expert have a look and finalise the dates for all the fragments we found.   

There are now features to be dug and we will be back on site soon.