Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham House
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Attendees: James P, Judy, Julian, Nigel B, Lindsey, Carrollanne, Stuart, Andrew, Gary, Geoff, Deborah, Doug, Thalia and Keith
With more fine weather and only five more days to remaining of this season work started as soon as we got onto site! In trench 4D Geoff and Deborah picked up with the contexts defined the previous day by Paula and Karen to explore the linear feature discovered as shown in Figure 1. The initial sondage suggested that the dark linear running left to right in Figure 1 (and perpendicular to the Roman road ) contained a possible post-hole supporting the initial interpretation that this could be a wall. Further exploration continued in the afternoon across the full length of this feature.
In Trench 4B Judy continued to excavate and record the fill of the pit which in addition to the large amount of CBM also contained the lower portion of a ceramic vessel. Also in Trench 4B, James continued with his sondage to explore what lay below the deposit of large flints in the NW of the trench. In addition to an assemblage of Roman period pottery, James also discovered a beautiful tinned Romano-British brooch possibly of the ‘Hod Hill’ type dating to the 1st – 2nd century AD complete with its pin still intact!
Elsewhere on site, Gary, Thalia and Julian continued to excavate Trench 4C, with the large flint deposit within the Roman road ditch being cleaned, recorded and photographed by the end of the day. Once levels and context sheets are completed tomorrow this context will be explored further to reveal the stratigraphy of the deposits within the road’s ditch. Meanwhile in Trench 2 Carrollanne and Lindsey cleaned up the newly revealed cobbled surface for recording tomorrow whilst Stuart completed defining how the layers of gravel north of the road ditch interacted with the cobbled surface being excavated by Lindsey and Carrollanne. In the newly opened trench 4E, Doug, Andrew and Nigel worked hard to reveal the archaeological horizon beneath…
