Priscan Archaeology
  • PA Home Page
  • PA Blogs
  • Meet The PA Team
  • PA Methodology & Techniques
  • The Badge of St Ursula
  • PA Milestones
  • Priscan Archaeological Treasures

Saturday 21 September 2019

22/9/2019

0 Comments

 
With the weather looking iffy for the Sunday, we decided to venture out on the Saturday instead.
We arrived in glorious sunshine with temperatures already climbing to the expected high of 22C, which isn't bad for the latter end of September!

This is a permission that we acquired recently and we have already paid it a first visit a few weeks ago resulting in some lovely Roman finds.
That was field JC001, we were now about to explore JC002 which looks promising from the research we'd carried out 6 years ago.

I sent the farmer a text and asked was it okay to survey JC002 and he said "yes, it's worked, so don't drive on it". We got there to find it in stubble!!!
I texted him to say I must have described the wrong field and he said "no worries, carry on". 
As we were 'tackling up' the farmer, and his dog, came over to us and we introduced ourselves, as we'd never met before.
I apologised over the field confusion to which he replied "Help yourselves to any of the fields, some are drilled, some worked and the others are in stubble."
We handed over the horse brass (now highly polished) that we found on the last visit and he was well pleased with it. He said that his father will love it as they have quite a large stable with several horses.

We got to the target area of the field and started to walk it. Within a couple of minutes a fragment of a hammered coin (Edward I/II) emerged, quickly followed by a C14th Medieval buckle plate.
This was a great start considering it looked to be a Romano-British site!
Not to worry, the first of the 9 Roman coins was recovered shortly after the buckle plate. More Roman coins were found including an early denarius of Titus dating to AD80 which celebrated the completion or the Colosseum at Rome in AD80 as well as the opening of the Games in the same year.
This coin is considered quite scarce.

The stubble became stiffer as the sun dried it out, so we thought a move might be on the cards, seeing that we had a Carte Blanche canvas to explore the other fields.

Field JC003 was impeccably rolled and drilled, but didn't have any identifiable features, so we were going in blind.
We decided to use our 'Zebra' search method to quickly assess what may lie in this field. Only one find was recovered and that was a lovely example of a Roman penannular brooch complete with its pin.
No other artefacts or pottery were evident meaning that this wasn't a settlement site and that any other finds would be casual losses.

We had a drive around to look at the other fields on the farm and thought doing a 'Zebra' search on some of these might be beneficial.
We split to search two of these fields, one in the stubble and the other two on a perfectly rolled and drilled field.
Nothing was found, with virtually no small iron targets or lead being found
showing that there was very little in lost in these areas. Ironically, in the centre of the stubble field was a Roman crossroads and even this didn't produce any human evidence.

As time was now running short, we had a look at JC004 which was 'worked' and quite flat. Being another large field, we did a 'Zebra' search on this one too.
A cut-half and a Roman grot were the only finds of note but there was an area that had lots of very large chunks of chalk and small ferrous items in a concentrated area of about 100 square metres. Again, no pottery was evident showing that there was a minimum amount of human interaction there.

On reflection, the first field, and our main target area, was the field to be in for finds. We look forward to revisiting this one as soon as it's re-drilled as we'll have full visibility of the field surface.... and no stubble to negotiate.

As usual, we used the 9" HF coils programmed in the standard GMP mode, but the targets were coming up from a slightly deeper level due to the sandy and low mineralised soil.
​
 HD images of the days finds can be seen here.





0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    July 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    April 2021
    December 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

    Picture
Home   Team   St Ursula   Artefacts  Blog