Well, here we are, perhaps one of the last digs this season, certainly on arable soil we are thinking?
The field had been ploughed along one edge of an already established wheat crop. The soil was damp and quite claggy with differing mixes of clay in it's soil profile. It is at least 5 years ago since this was last ploughed and the condition of most of the Roman coins recovered are testament to this area not seeing much plough activity.

Apart from recovering 1.44kg of mainly Roman pottery, we also found 28 Roman coins including two denarii, some of the coins had very nice detail indeed! A Roman fibula and other artefacts, mainly Roman came to light.
There were some nice examples of base sherds including one from a Roman grey ware goblet. A piece of molten slag had bronze and silver within it and another item, a mount, resembles the "Swastika" symbol.
The beginning of the search along the strip highlighted two major areas of ferrous targets with what must have been hundreds of nails. A couple of these beggars are featured below. The Déus just sailed through these with ease, although Déus "Fast" was used in certain sections.

We had a quick look at a nearby field that also had a ploughed and drilled strip along its edge. This produced something we hadn't seen for a long while, a decorated spindle whorl.

Unfortunately, we didn't film any of today's survey due to the conditions (mud everywhere) so hopefully the 70 images from the day will make up for it? 

Below is an image showing some of the ferrous nails mixed in with copper alloy nails and two coins for a size comparison. As you can see, the coins are quite small compared to the nails but this didn't present a problem.

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The above coin is a follis of Constantine I dating to AD 310-313. These are sometimes silver coated but this example doesn't appear to have been silvered.

The finds, as usual, came from the first 5 inches of the field surface and all detected using the GMP setting as standard except one machine used "Tracking" for GB and one of the coils used was the 13" which actually recovered the smallest coin of the day.

​70 High Definition images can be seen here.

After several requests to create videos of our excursions we decided to attempt our first video.

​The footage was captured with the same camera that is used for the still's images that you see on our Flickr site.
The Lumix DMC TZ71 is quite a small camera and has a great wide-angled lens so any camera movement is quite smooth.
Unfortunately, as we found out last Sunday, the wind noise was very loud as it was probably one of the windiest days we've ever encountered whilst detecting!

One of the biggest challenges was filming AND metal-detecting at the same time. However, we did find a method that was fair to the cameraman so that the detecting time lost was kept to a minimum.

The resulting film shows the conditions of the site and the linear methodology we use to such great effect.

The film can be seen here.

Hopefully we can continue to film our future ventures into the world of ancient history.