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Issue 68December 2002ContentsnewsScatness dates push back history of brochs 'Londoners' stone sheds light on city's cosmopolitan ways Ivory plane from Roman settlement in the North East Wealthy trading suburb excavated near Roman fort History from pig fields, beaches and back gardens featuresRoman Britons after 410 Bear pit to zoo Great sites lettersRoman roads, talismans, animal bones and Tolkien (again) issuesGeorge Lambrick on the pillage of the warship 'Sussex' Peter EllisbooksCBA updatefavourite findsBill Putnam on a World War II fork in a 'prehistoric' ditch
ISSN 1357-4442 Editor Simon Denison |
favourite findsThe fork, the farmer and the ‘Bronze Age’ ditchBill Putnam on the moment when he learned the value of listening to local people Some of my favourite finds came out of a Roman road excavation in 1982 near Eggardon hillfort in Dorset, at the point where the Roman road from Dorchester to Exeter leaves the chalk uplands and swings down towards Bridport. It was a training dig for the Dorset Institute of Higher Education - the precursor of Bournemouth University - where I taught at the time. My interest was in the road itself and its relationship to an Iron Age cross-ridge dyke which defended a presumed settlement on the spur. Had the road engineers of Legio II Augusta cut through the dyke, or were they following a prehistoric ridgeway and would therefore have passed through an existing entrance in the dyke? The answer to this was in fact easily obtained. The Roman road remains accessible - and highly visible - in grassland as it approaches and passes through the dyke, only later merging with a modern minor road. Thus its passage through the dyke could be examined. We found that the dyke stopped short of the road, which thus passed through a pre-existing entrance. Very interesting. This was where things began to go awry. We had time and resources to spare (those were the days!) so we looked at other aspects of the road. For a start there were patches of nettles every ten or so metres along the side of the road, and examination of one of these confirmed it was a small quarry pit, used to provide the chalk and flints of which the agger - the main road structure - was built. Then between two of these pits there was a mound, which we initially thought might be a pile of surplus road material. This hypothesis crumbled at the first spadeful below the topsoil. Three bodies lay there, close to the surface. They were later dated to the 8th century AD, and presumably came from an Anglo-Saxon community in the valley below. The photograph of a student lying on a plank over the skeletons to clean them was used to illustrate the following year's prospectus, and led to jokes about the course in necrophilia at Bournemouth. So it was an Anglo-Saxon burial mound. But was that all? We dug a trench across the mound to see if it had a ditch, and it soon revealed two Bronze Age urns. A Bronze Age mound then - its prehistoric date reassuringly confirmed by the fact that the mound was cut by the ditch of the Roman road. Then we came to what we thought was the ditch of the barrow itself, which caused some puzzlement as it seemed better preserved than might be expected, and rather more square in section than is usual. Had it perhaps been recut when the Anglo-Saxon bodies were interred? At this point proceedings were interrupted by our open day, and many villagers came to see the dig. I made a fool of myself by declaring that 'the field has never been ploughed . . .', only to be greeted by 'Oh yes it has!' from the back of the crowd. The man who ploughed it once during World War II had his moment of glory. What's more, he explained that our barrow ditch, far from belonging to the Bronze Age or Saxon periods, had been cut by the army during exercises on the hill. It ran along the crest of the hill, he said, and passed close to our barrow but otherwise had nothing to do with it. I was very polite, but smugly remembered the inaccuracy of local memories about such things. Back in the 1960s, for example, local people visiting Leslie Alcock's excavations at South Cadbury hillfort in Somerset had assured him that ditches there had been dug by the Home Guard during the war. In fact the ditches turned out to be the foundations of an unfinished cross-shaped Anglo-Saxon church. The following day we bottomed the ditch, and found the most closely dated find I have ever known - a culinary fork made by Mappin and Webb, with the War Department logo, and dated 1939. Bill Putnam, a former Principal Lecturer in Archaeology at Bournemouth University, is the author of 'Roman Dorset' |
CBA web:British ArchaeologyFebruary 2000 CBA BriefingFieldwork CBA homepage |
