Today's venture saw us revisit two adjacent sites.
The first site was seeded with winter wheat and was as flat as a pancake.
The last visit in 2015 saw several hammered coins and artefacts recovered but on the recent visit on January 29th, a much smaller amount of finds were evident. We thought that it may have been a "quiet" side of the field. This however was not the case; only two hammered coins and a small amount of items came to light.
We realised that the reason for this was that the ground had only been cultivated and only a few inches of the surface disturbed.
Once again we saw that if a field that had only been cultivated or directly drilled, this resulted in at least a 75% drop in finds.
It will be very interesting to see if this field is ploughed at the end of the year and if so, what the results will be then.
We decided that any further time spent on this field would not be worth the effort we apply, so with that we moved to the permission next door.
We kept the same set-up with the 13" coils and standard GMP mode.
The wheat in this field was now well advanced and to such a degree that any surface finds were difficult to see. Another aspect was that is was also increasingly difficult to move the 13" coils against the wheat.
Again, we moved to another field and found three more fragments of the stone loom weights that we've found at this permission but never before in this field. Currently, no-one can give us a definitive answer as to the age or use for these stone relics. We are still trying to bottom these and solve this enigma.
We'd surveyed this field when it was first drilled last year but didn't manage to complete it.
We then moved to a field that was in a state of readiness for drilling and was surprisingly flat in parts. The soil was quite soft and fluffy so probably didn't help in the depth argument. A nice Roman coin and fibula fragment were recovered.
We called it a day and our thoughts settled on where we might be on our next outing.
We recovered 3 Roman coins, a C1st fibula fragment, a James VI Half Thistle Merk, a Charles Ist Scottish Twenty-Pence, a nice neck section of a Bellarmine jug, a Medieval floor tile fragment, three fragments of those stone relics we can't get an answer to and other miscellaneous items.
High Def images can be seen here.
The first site was seeded with winter wheat and was as flat as a pancake.
The last visit in 2015 saw several hammered coins and artefacts recovered but on the recent visit on January 29th, a much smaller amount of finds were evident. We thought that it may have been a "quiet" side of the field. This however was not the case; only two hammered coins and a small amount of items came to light.
We realised that the reason for this was that the ground had only been cultivated and only a few inches of the surface disturbed.
Once again we saw that if a field that had only been cultivated or directly drilled, this resulted in at least a 75% drop in finds.
It will be very interesting to see if this field is ploughed at the end of the year and if so, what the results will be then.
We decided that any further time spent on this field would not be worth the effort we apply, so with that we moved to the permission next door.
We kept the same set-up with the 13" coils and standard GMP mode.
The wheat in this field was now well advanced and to such a degree that any surface finds were difficult to see. Another aspect was that is was also increasingly difficult to move the 13" coils against the wheat.
Again, we moved to another field and found three more fragments of the stone loom weights that we've found at this permission but never before in this field. Currently, no-one can give us a definitive answer as to the age or use for these stone relics. We are still trying to bottom these and solve this enigma.
We'd surveyed this field when it was first drilled last year but didn't manage to complete it.
We then moved to a field that was in a state of readiness for drilling and was surprisingly flat in parts. The soil was quite soft and fluffy so probably didn't help in the depth argument. A nice Roman coin and fibula fragment were recovered.
We called it a day and our thoughts settled on where we might be on our next outing.
We recovered 3 Roman coins, a C1st fibula fragment, a James VI Half Thistle Merk, a Charles Ist Scottish Twenty-Pence, a nice neck section of a Bellarmine jug, a Medieval floor tile fragment, three fragments of those stone relics we can't get an answer to and other miscellaneous items.
High Def images can be seen here.
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