After last week's session, first-time bottle digging, we now had an opportunity to re-visit one of our favourite sites that has a multitude of varied settlement evidence across the landscape.

This particular field has what we suspect to be a small Roman villa, also known as a farmstead.
The evidence we've acquired over the last couple of visits has shown that the villa had quite wealthy owners in that they had a tesserae floor with partial roof tiling and had use of Samian Ware dishes.
Fibulae have also been recovered along with Roman coinage including denarii as well as a few hammered coins including one of King Harold.

The weather conditions were sort of  perfect, with a clear sky, and a lovely cooling breeze coming from the East. There was a downside however, the breeze would prove to play havoc with the video sound levels! This will make it tricky when it comes to editing as I would prefer to keep the original sound. Once the images for Flickr are sorted, I'll start on the video.
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The field was perfectly flat with none of the pea crop showing which allowed 100% visibility of the surface making it easy to spot any surface pottery etc.
However, the soil was extremely dry and powdery, almost like fine sand. This didn't bode too well for depth, but there again, most of our small finds come from within 5 inches of the field surface anyway!

The first run was down the headland and the first signal was a Roman fibula dating from the C1st or early C2nd with a few pieces of greenwaste appearing. This permission has lots of greenwaste covering most fields which make some of them un-detectable.
We then followed the main drill direction and it wasn't long before the Roman grots began to appear.

The area that we suspected may be a Roman building had a scatter of chalk which stood out against the slightly darker soil colour. This may have been part of the original flooring along with a small area of tesserae to add a luxurious feel to the building? Some of the tesserae were of different colours. Over thirty pieces of tesserae were recovered and logged to ten decimal places on the GB OS GPS system, as were all recordable finds. 

We recovered 2 denarii (one quite rare), 21 Roman bronze coins, 2 fibulae (one with traces of enamel), 1 Roman key-ring (scarce), the obligatory hammered coin (Tudor), a Medieval buckle with tongue, several fragments of Roman pottery (1.89kg), oyster shell as well as 5 fragments of Medieval pottery dating to C13th. 
All of these can seen in High Definition on our Flickr site.

We called in to see the landowners as we haven't seen them for a while and the lady of the house put the kettle on the agar and made us both a cup of tea. We had a great catch up and checked out the report on the archaeological survey that we had organised there last year. The report was superb and they even included a preview to the another dig later this year.
Lovely to see that the team at Priscan Archaeology have received official recognition from the highest echelons of the archaeological world in recognition of the hard work we've put in to get this dig up and running. This is truley a reflection on all responsible detectorists and an example of what can be done if you put your mind to it.

During the catch up we confirmed that we will restructure their WiFi setup and bring the whole farm communication system up-to-date.
This will benefit the information centre they have and enable visitors to use all the new facilities on offer.

​Of course, we will submit all today's findings from this villa site to the landowners, and the archaeological team, in order to assess the full excavation potential for 2019.

High Definition images of today's finds can be seen here.

A double-edged sword with regards to today's survey as the weather promised to be fabulous but then there was the threat of the Bank Holiday traffic. Indeed, the weather was great, if a little warm and the field had been part power-harrowed. The traffic both ways was quite easy going to be honest, in fact it was better than some of the "normal" weekends!

Just before we made a start on our target field, we paid a visit to a permission nearby to check the field conditions there. All three fields had been deeply ploughed to at least 12 inches which left 2ft furrows and consequently, the potato planting was now in full progress.
This bodes well for when the next wheat crop is drilled later this year or early 2019. 

​Back to the target field; we made progress down the eastern side of the  field and found the conditions to be very crumbly and dry.
The temperature was already beginning to soar and the first of 28 Roman coins began to emerge. Most were "grots" but this field does throw up some superb examples, as we saw last week with the fantastically detailed follis of Crispus coming up.
A tractor arrived after an hour and started to power-harrow the remainder of the field alongside where we were detecting. This made the field even flatter than it was before, although quite soft and aerated.

We were then joined by two other detectorists but they didn't appear to be sticking to any planned or structured search pattern. At one point they were 150 metres apart and were travelling in different directions to each other.
It wasn't too long before one of them came alongside us and started to chat  about our machines and settings we were using as they were both using a different brand of detector.
They stayed for three hours and found a total of 3 Roman grots. What was amazing is that one was walking at a brief pace using full-sized steps whilst the other chap was "pendulum" swinging with the coil at least 10" above the ground at the end of each swing.
​It just shows that even with this method of searching, it can still result in the recovery of finds!
 
Apart from the 28 Roman coins/grots, the artefacts we managed to recover were as follows; a nice Roman fantail fibula with red and blue enamel still evident, a large Roman finger ring, a coiled Roman finger ring, a Roman buckle, a Roman pin, a Roman connecting link, 3 lead spindle whorls/weights, a George III sixpence, a Dutch one-cent piece dating to 1881, Medieval strapends, a Rose farthing, a cartwheel penny and a few pieces of Roman pottery.

As last week, the 13" coil and two 9" HF coils were used in the standard GMP mode. One of the 9" coils were set at 75 on the Manual GB setting.
All signals were strong and confident with no "iffy" signals at all.
Even the tiniest of minims were found with ease along with tiny pieces of lead too. 

High Definition images can be seen here. 

We managed to part-survey 2 sites today, one predominantly Medieval and the other predominantly Roman.

Site 1 was newly drilled Spring Wheat offering great detecting and fieldwalking conditions.
As mentioned, most items recovered here reflect the whole Medieval period including Saxon and C14th artefacts.
Oddly, 3 Roman grots were found along with a hammered silver looking like a James Ist half-groat, a pierced jetton, bronze beads, strapend fragments, buckles, pottery and a couple of fossils!

We decided to have a look at another site to assess the conditions there.
On arrival we could see that 3 fields had been deep ploughed over the top of a Roman settlement. The worry here is that the crop may be potatoes which means it will be off the agenda for a long while even though we are allowed to detect newly seeded potatoes. It's by personal choice that we don't survey potato crops.
Apparently, there may be a potato shortage as the growers down south are 6 weeks behind schedule.

We moved on to site 2 to find it power-harrowed and quite flat.
Being a large Roman site we expected to find evidence quiet quickly and the first of 17 Roman coins emerged within the the first minutes of switching on. Some of the coins were in amazing condition and the other coins that were recovered were a siliqua, a cut-half and a William III love token.

On both sites we used 1 x 13" coil and 2 x 9" HF coils, standard GMP with one of the 9" coils in "Tracking" mode.

High Definition images of the days finds can be seen here and here.

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