Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham House
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Attendees: Julian, Martin, John H, Tim L, Chloe, Lindsey, Ben, Matthew, Anna, Kai, Susanne, Claire, David, Rod and Keith
In Trench 15, Martin and team continued to excavate in a number of areas to the north of the Roman road to reveal the expected horizon of Roman occupation in/around Building #3 identified in 2025. Lots of Roman pottery and a 4th Century AD Roman numus coin were discovered, but as yet we are only getting hints of the archaeological horizon we encountered in the previous season. This Trench promises to be really exciting, so work will continue tomorrow…
In Trench 16, Ben and Matthew got the day off to an exciting start by discovering the return of the robbed out construction trench of the corn-drier (or possible malting house) to the southeast of the flint wall as shown in Figure 2. This discovery suggests that the corn drier is of a “U-shaped” configuration, and work will continue tomorrow to reveal the full outline of this structure so it, and the areas surrounding it, can be analysed in more detail for dating the period when it was in use and who might have been using it…
Elsewhere in Trench 16, Lindsey and Susanne continued with the recording of the furnace pit and flue, whilst Tim L excavated the beam slot at the north end of the trench. With the number of discoveries made in this trench in the past few days there is still plenty of work to be done, but good use was made of the GPS device to accurately position features within the trench on plans being recorded.
Meanwhile in Trench 17, Julian and Chloe spent the morning finalising the records of this trench to ensure all the features revealed had been included. Then they continued to half section the trench to reveal more of the “natural” surface uncovered earlier in the week. This resulted in a really interesting piece of Nene Valley colour coated ware pottery being found by Chloe together with fragments of Samian pottery. The Nene Valley pottery sherds featured relief decoration of a deer or horse suggesting that this was from a “hunt cup” beaker that were being produced in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries AD, and hopefully can be more accurately dated by our pottery specialist. This high status tableware is known to have been popular with individuals within the military as well as the rural elite, so may give us further clues to the identities of the occupants of this area of Roman Wickham during the Early Roman period!
