Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham House
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Attendees: Chloe, Geoff, Jules, Chris, Lindsey, Jill, Ruby, Kate, Carrollanne, Mike, Martin, Phil C, Louise and Keith
Having got a soaking the previous Wednesday and rained off completely on the Thursday, it was great to be back on site. Unfortunately Trench 17 was 0.5m deep with rain water, so was “bailed out” and left to dry – and Trench 18 was also waterlogged, but this allowed us to focus our efforts on Trenches 15 and 16 whilst dodging a few showers in the morning…
In trench 16 Kate, Lindsey, Ruby and Geoff continued to define the surfaces revealed beneath the gravel deposits surrounding the corn drier. This was delicate work, but after the wet weekend, conditions were perfect for cleaning surfaces and identifying features. Planning of the newly revealed surfaces got underway in the afternoon, and tomorrow will be focused on recording context sheets and taking levels…
In Trench 15 Jill and Jules continued with the excavation of the ditch along the north side of the Roman road, whilst Chloe cleaned a slot across the lane and its ditch. Both these two areas revealed a number of interesting pieces of CBM and pottery.
Further to the north, Phil C, Martin and Chris not only discovered our largest fragment of hypocaust flue tile to date, but also revealed what appears to be east-west/north-south aligned masonry footings on top of Roman archaeology. Further work is needed to define these features, but the initial interpretation is that these could be related to the 12th century manor house discovered on top of the Roman road last season?
At the north end of Trench 15 Louise, Carrollanne and Mike continued to define the surfaces either side of the stone berm thought to be the footings of Building #3. Again, further work is needed to clean, plan and record these new contexts, but Mike discovered an interesting piece of Samian pottery and Carrollanne discovered our first piece of amphora which are both dateable imported objects that may shed new light on this area of the site.
