Hunting Hall Archaeology Blog

22nd June 2025 : Dig Diary Day 21

Thanks to Kristian for the information in today’s diary. Today marks the end of our third week. Now there’s only a week to go and as we’ve found in previous years things tend to speed up and get more interesting as we approach the end of our dig (remember the AngloSaxon grave turning up on the penultimate day of our dig in 2022 that had us on tenterhooks until we could go back to it a year later). It’s been great to see a couple of old friends back with us today; even if their time is limited we’re thrilled to have their company. During the last few days we’ve also been privileged to have visits by other experienced archaeologists. All along we’ve learned that archaeology isn’t an exact science (what is?) and that interpretation is often based on experience and precedence. The visiting archaeologists have provided us with some good advice on the preservation of the timber and bone finds from Trench 8. Also the visitors today were quite helpful in interpreting the 'mysterious circular feature' that some of my colleagues suggested was a Bronze Age mortuary enclosure: their opinion is that Iron Age roundhouses can indeed be that large (15m diameter), and they are not altogether unusual from more recent studies. This is much more consistent with the data, and would explain the central position of John HR's posthole.

Their opinion on Trench 8 is that it is a particularly large ditch. The presence of the stake holes might be a retaining wall of wattle to hold the clay back, but once the site was abandoned or the trench ignored, they clay washed in -- perhaps in an unusually wet episode (maybe even wetter than last night?). Also, the material in the ditch seems to be consistent with discard (i.e. a dumping ground), rather than deliberate deposition, but this is contingent on the spatial patterning. By this we mean whether the animal bone deposit is continuous or localised. At the moment, we have an impression that it is continuous, but this can only be said of the small extent that we have exposed. With only a week to go we are expecting the excitement to be turned up to eleven. Please don’t miss out! There from 10.00 tomorrow.