Lyminge Archaeology

It has been a few weeks since the end of the dig and lots has happened, indeed we’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to blog! At last things have settled down and I am able to give you a round up of the final discoveries of the Lyminge excavations 2013. Gabor stayed an extra week with Andy Macintosh and a couple of volunteers to get the trench completely finished while I returned to the department to deal with the more mundane administrative things required to run an excavation that had been stacking up! We had more archaeology in this trench than we’ve ever encountered before at Lyminge, so it really was down to the wire. We had an absolute deadline, too, as Gabor and I were off to Germany to a conference on the Saturday following the official end of the dig.

Gabor thanks students and volunteers for their amazing help this season

Everyone piles in to the wonderful spread – huge thanks to all the amazing people who baked for the hungry diggers!

But first, to more important things! On the last Friday of the dig it is now traditional to thank our volunteers, particularly those who have gone the extra mile, and to eat rather a lot of cake. Our wonderful volunteers rustle up some amazing goodies and we certainly all piled in!

This last little ‘hurrah’ on the dig is especially to thank people like Keith Parfitt and Andy Macintosh, who come to us from Canterbury Archaeological Trust, but who both give up lots of their free time for the dig too. We have some volunteers who spend nearly every single digging day with us, so we took the opportunity to thank them too, people like Les, Peter and Richard, John and Frances Locke, and volunteers who help with very specific and important things, like Rosemary and John Piddock who took fantastsic photographs of our small finds, and Bill Laing who came with his helicopter drone to take aerial shots as often as he could – it was suprisingly windy this summer! There are so many people to thank that it’s hard to keep up! Our finds washing team were fantastic, as ever, with so many that we know well from five seasons of digging.

Some of our dedicated finds washing volunteers – many of whom also brought cake on the last Friday of the dig!

But what of the archaeology? By the end of the extra 7th week of the dig, we had the ‘camera on a pole’ man, Peter, come from Hawkeye Elevated Photography to take photos. He has an extremely tall telescopic pole that extends from his Land Rover to take wonderful photos from above, and we end up with fantastic pictures like this:

A view of the 2013 trench facing south-west.

As you can see from the photo, not only did the weather hold out, but a huge amount of archaeology was completed this year. Three timber hall buildings were 100% excavated, as well two sunken-featured buildings, three very large and unsual early Saxon pits and the corner of a fourth timber hall in the extension trench. This doesn’t include dealing with the archaeology from a range of other periods that we had to record and draw just as carefully.

Unusual features popped up too in the last week – the partition wall that we discovered in the largest timber hall that had the enormous doorway pits turned out also to have a huge pit across the threshold. We’re still working out why this might be, as usually partition walls would not need to so structurally dramatic. You can see in this fantastic photo that we have another huge doorway pit actually inside the final timber hall – the shadow gives away the depth.

An aerial shot of the whole trench, taken from the East using a telescopic rig on a land rover, visible in shadow. The large partition wall doorway pit is visible in the easternmost building in the foreground. (Photo by Hawkeye Elevated Photography)

Helicopter drone photogrpah of the site on the 1st September 2013. Click to enlarge. (photo by William Laing)

If you compare to the aerial shot (right) that local resident William Laing took using a helicopter drone on the final ‘official’ day of the dig, you can see how much progress was made by Gabor and Andy in the last, very necessary, extra week of the dig.

If you’ve been following the blog you’ll remember that we discovered the corner of a particularly large timber hall in our ‘extension’ of the main trench, on the left (west) of the photo above right. Careful excavation of this area revealed something that we believe is unprecedented in the excavation of Anglo-Saxon hall buildings. In cleaning back a portion of the wall trench we revealed more of rows of wall planks that were placed within the wall trenches on construction of the buldings.

A section of wall trench excavated to reveal the settings of the rotted timber planks that formed the walls.

The next photo below shows the planks excavated, and you can see really well what an interesting and significant find this is.

The planks ‘ghosts’ have been excavated and here you can see three rows of planks

The photo above shows three rows of planks – one double paired row and a third row of slightly larger and offset planks, all set in to the same wall trench. Further on (to the east) are two large round post holes. This is a really exciting find as so far we are not aware of any Anglo-Saxon buildings with this construction method. Additionally, you can see on the left up against the baulk, that there are very large external raking post settings packed with flints and other stones. We may be talking about a very substantial building here, and something to continue investigating next year!

There were also some really fascinating finds in the days of the dig. One of the most exciting was the discovery by David Holman, who helps us metal detect the site and who knows everything there is to know about coinage in Britain. He was in fact excavating, (rather than detecting!) a portion of wall trench in the complicated area where all the buildings intersect, and he discovered this wonderful bone and copper alloy gaming piece.

A composite bone and copper alloy gaming piece found in a wall trench.

This little object is of great significance. While gaming pieces are known from the Anglo-Saxon period, this particular form is unusual. It is made of several pieces of bone held together by a central copper alloy rivet or pin, a ‘composite’ type.  The only other parallels for this style of gaming piece in the British Isles are found in the princely burial at Taplow, Buckinghamshire. The Taplow burial contained such items as beautiful metal fittings from drinking horns, glass claw beakers and a gold and garnet buckle, artefacts on a similar level of richness to those at Sutton Hoo. Taplow has been dated to the very early 7th century (click the links to see images and descriptions on the British Museum website).

All of this detail shows us how Lyminge fits in with this incredibly high status suite of sites. Surprisingly, it is Italian Langobardic contexts that provide the best parallels to this gaming piece, and it has been suggested that these gaming pieces are coming via similar trade routes to those of the Byzantine bronze bowls that are found in wealthy elite graves of 7th century.

A selection of the high quality glass we found this season at Lyminge

Our collection of glass certainly supports our understanding of Lyminge as a high status settlement! We ended the season with well over 100 fragments of glass, of a whole selection of types. Here above are just a few, proving that the vessels that are found in graves were not just for show and were certainly being used in every day feasting situations.

Finally, some of you may have heard about us moving the travelling exhibition that accompanies the digs to Dover Museum! Gabor and I set up the exhibition panels in the museum on Monday, and we were lucky enough to be featured on BBC South East Today last night (1st October 2013, 22 minutes in), as well as on the BBC News website. Have a click on the links to see the reports.

Part of the web gallery on the BBC news website – click the picture to go to the slideshow.

We have been able to install objects to go with the panels, and the exhibit is right next to the Anglo-Saxon galleries so you can see a range of Anglo-Saxon finds local to Lyminge and Dover.

Part of our display at Dover Museum – you’ll have to visit to see the rest!

There is lots more to digest from this summer, and once we have begun that process in earnest I can bring you more news. As usual I will be updating the blog throughout the year whenever we have something exciting to tell you about the project, so keep checking back to find out more about the exciting finds on Tayne Field!

Massive progress made in the trench this week

The last week of the dig has seen some exciting archaeology emerge and yet more re-interpretations of building phasing as we try to get to the bottom of the sequence of timber halls and SFBs in the trench. This update is certainly necessary before the end of the dig this weekend!

The photo above shows a beautiful, almost cloudless sunny day – and that is certainly what we have this week. Last weekend was another story! Those of you living in Kent, or indeed in the South East, will have experienced the torrential downpours that washed us all out on Saturday. While we’ve been hankering after a spot of rain to make digging easier, we didn’t anticipate quite the monsoon that we got. In places, we had two feet of water in our features, and four days later there is still a small puddle in the bottom of the western door pit of Building 1!

Torrential rain on site – you can see the water rising in the Saxo-Norman ditches in the foreground

Features full of rain water – and this was only after about an hour of rain!

We knew it would rain, so changed the day off to the Saturday. Staff went up to sort things out on site and see if any work could be done. For a couple of hours it drizzled and all was well, but the rain struck and there was nothing else for it but to run for cover! We de-camped to the pub as soon as we could get all the equipment in and make sure the site was ok.

Gabor enjoys the wet weather

Gabor’s boots were so muddy he caved and went for the professorial staple of socks and sandals for the first time!

In fact, we didn’t lose a day at all and in the end the rain really helped to bring out the differences in colour on site. As a result we can now say that there are three timber halls in the main part of the trench, two of which share a south end wall and cut through SFB 6, providing us with a nice sequence. Only one of these halls would have been standing at a time. The third hall, the largest with the rectangular door post pits, appears to be the last in the sequence, but we need to disentangle corner to the east of SFB 6 where all the halls are cutting one another to confirm this.

Peter excavates the north east corner of Timber Building 1, which has the largest door post pits. To the left of the foreground is SFB 7.

You can see from the photo below how complicated the sequence is! SFB 6 is cut here by three walls, one of which is a partition wall. For the uninitiated this will look rather complicated, particularly as the SFB was excavated in quadrants. The areas of red daub are SFB backfill, while the longer wall trenches have been fully excavated in two quadrants, but are still visible as lighter ‘stripes’ in the unexavated quadrants.

Three wall trenches cutting SFB 6 – taken from the west

Zoe plans the two east-west walls and a north-south wall trench cutting through SFB 6. The chalky area in the middle is the natural chalk bedrock bottom of the SFB.

The dark rectangular stain on the left of the wall trench is the ‘ghost’ of a timber plank that was once placed in the trench to form part of the end wall to a timber hall

The photo on the right here shows the ‘ghost’ of a timber plank – where the wooden upright plank used to be before it was removed on the abandonment of the hall. We are seeing examples of these in all the wall trenches, and when they are excavated strategraphically, like the photograph below, show clearly how the wall trenches were dug out, the planks were placed in upright, and the wall trenches were then backfilled to support the planks properly.

We also have evidence for more substantial post holes as raking posts cut into the wall trenches to provide extra support to the roof and walls in several of the building phases.

I’ve written about our very large cess pit (with smelting slag in the top) before, but much more of it has been excavated now. It is particularly interesting because it appears to be early Saxon, and pits are notable by their absence in this period. It is almost square, again an unusual shape. In this corner of the site there are in fact three large pits, with this square cess pit being the largest and deepest. All three look early in date and we’re excited that we seem to have yet again found evidence that is rare or indeed unique to Lyminge.

Alex excavates the last of the cess-like fills in his large square pit.

It’s become a running joke that when a supervisor gets in a feature to help out a student, they find something really great, while the student has found nothing for hours.

Here I am ‘snaffling’ a find out of SFB 7 – I was only helping out, honest!

This certainly happened to me yesterday! I was helping out in SFB 7 when I found our first knife of the whole season, and it appears to be complete! Luckily for the students I am usually bogged down with paperwork, supervision, and of course writing this blog, so I don’t get too many of the finds to myself!

There is lots to do in the last couple of days here, so there will be at least one more blog post to catch everyone up with the removal of the final wall trenches and the disentangling of the overlapping buildings. The large door pits for the biggest timber hall are nearly fully excavated and we’re sorting out what they were actually for – door pits of this size are entirely unnecessary, so why were they built on this scale? I might be able to say something next time, fingers crossed! In this last photo you can see Westy has bottomed the door pit and there is a further post hole at the far end, cutting through the wall trench – perhaps evidence for different phases in the construction of these doorways.

Westy indicates the bottom of the door pit on the eastern long wall of the largest timber hall. A post hole in the end of the wall trench is visible in section, with the wall trench continuing on behind.

I’ll get another post up as soon as I can to wrap up the dig, which has sped by. None of us can quite believe we’re nearly at the end! We’re hopeful for some lovely aerial shots of the trench this weekend or early next week, so I will try to get those up too – watch this space!

A warrior in Lyminge

Jennifer, Steph and Emily (l-r) play a Saxon board game

What an amazing few days we’ve had here in Lyminge! We’ve been incredibly busy so this time I have turned two blog posts into one to get you caught up on the whirlwind of activity that has been the Lyminge dig over last week or so!

We were thrilled to have an amazing turn out for our open day on Saturday, even though the weather was a little changeable.

We’re incredibly grateful to Bethany, our visitor liaison, who ran such a fantastically smooth and stress free day. We got around 500 visitors over the course of the day, 200 more than last year’s event! It seems word has got around and we’re thrilled to be able to share our findings with such a large number of people. Don’t forget we are still running Saturday site tours at 2pm until the end of the dig. The last will be on the 31st August.

A Saxon battle unfolds on Tayne Field!

We were visited by Centingas, a local group of Saxon re-enactors who helped to bring to life the people who  lived in the settlement we are excavating at Lyminge during the 5th-7th centuries AD. Here Emily (Aelfwynn), who is also our assistant Finds Supervisor, learns to weave with Deorwynn (left).

Learning to weave

A huge amount of help from villagers, volunteers, students and staff made for a fantastic day, and we heard so many saying they had enjoyed themselves which makes it all worth it. The site tours were extremely well attended, even with Gabor having to battle against the noise of the wind and church bells!

Gabor gives a site tour on the open day

Enjoying the children’s dig – finding a few more Roman finds than we are!

The children had lots to do too, with a chance to try out digging themselves on the ‘little dig’, and lots of worksheets and colouring to do – our university students helped our smaller visitors design a Saxon brooch.

One of our popular attractions was the Saxo-Norman horse! Our zooarchaeology expert Zoe Knapp was on hand to answer questions about animal bones, and with

Zoe shows our visitors what a horse’s skeleton looks like. This horse was found in a Saxo-Norman ditch and dates to around the 12th Century

the help of recent archaeology graduate Cordelia Laycock, fielded all of these and many more regarding the animal bone at Lyminge and what people were eating and farming.

Our finds tables were well attended too! Helen and her team of volunteers, (both local and part of our student contingent) manned the desks and showed everyone the fascinating things we have found so far – and not just Anglo-Saxon finds that I have been showing you in the blog, but lots from the World War II structures and the Late Medieval period too. Some of these were identified by members of the public too!

Manning the finds desk on the open day – we had some great suggestions as to what some of our metalwork might be. The large piece in the foreground is a WWII frying pan from the cook house!

Simon and his Environmental team helped to explain the sampling strategies we employ on site to search for charred grains, charcoal and other archaeobotanical remains, as well as things like snails and fish bone.

Luke, Alex, Simon and Pip sorting residues for snails, seeds and small animal bones – Alex seems to be enjoying himself!

Geoff Halliwell demonstrates flint knapping

Geoff Halliwell returned this year to show us how flint was knapped into tools in the past – despite our Anglo-Saxon site we do actually have an extremely large assemblage of mesolithic tools and other worked and struck flints in Lyminge, which show us that we have occupation in the area for more than 10,000 years.

But what of the digging?! Excavation continued all day on the open day, albeit with a slightly reduced team.

Significant progress has been made since the last blog post. The timber buildings are now under intensive excavation and structural details are being revealed.

Aerial shot of the doorway area in the larger timber hall captured by Steve Thomas using a camera on a very long telescopic arm

Slots have been placed over various significant areas in the timber halls. We are now certain, as many of you will have heard on the open day tours, that the less elaborate hall

Aiji excavates a slot over a raking post and a wall trench in the eastern long wall of the later timber hall

with narrower wall trenches is earlier in date than the hall that has the elaborate entrances and extremely deep rectangular post pits. The later hall is a replacement for something slightly less ‘fancy’.

The later hall had timber raking posts that were put in slightly after the wall trenches were dug. These would be for extra support for the roof and show we have a different method of construction to the the hall we excavated last year which didn’t have any evidence for raking posts at all. The door pit on the western side of the later timber hall is now fully bottomed, and you can see from the photograph below that it is a considerable depth.

A section through the door pit on the western long wall of the later timber hall

Thus far we only have evidence for one timber, which you can see in the section (if you look very carefully!) as the narrow dark line with a piece of Roman tile right underneath it at the bottom. We need to complete excavation of this rectangular pit (more than 2m long!) before we can say what kind of doorway or entrance construction there might have been. What we can suggest is that, considering that we have lost the original ground surface due to erosion, the original height of the door posts above ground might have been as much as four metres! Could this building have been of two storeys? Further excavation will add to the picture.

Plank ghosts excavated in the wall trench of the earlier timber building

Excavation of the earlier hall’s wall trenches is moving ahead.

Rachel excavates timber plank ‘ghosts’ in a wall trench – the remains of rotted timbers.

The photos above show some of the wall trenches of the two timber buildings under excavation, but you can see in these photographs that the timber ‘ghosts’ of the posts that were once in place in the wall trenches survive remarkably well.

Rachel is excavating the ghosts in the north end wall trench of the earlier timber building, and you can see how clearly the construction methods come up in the subsequent photo below. This part of the wall trench cuts right across SFB 6, so we can tell that the

The ‘ghosts’ of timber planks in the wall trench of building 2, cutting right through SFB 6.

building is later than this sunken-featured building. Unlike last year’s ‘Great Hall’, the wall trenches here only have a single line of planks. The Great Hall had paired planks all the way along its walls, which goes along with the fact that it was a much larger building.

The buildings themselves are particularly fascinating as we now have several different types of construction, as well as some phasing on site for the first time – we can track the development of the settlement from SFBs to relatively simple timber buildings, through to more elaborate constructions such as the Great Hall and this year’s 15m x 8m timber hall that may have had more than one storey.

The story doesn’t end with the structures, however. A recent find gives us an insight into the type of community living in Lyminge, as if amethyst beads, brooches and horse harness mounts aren’t enough! Just a few days ago this rather unusual animal bone turned up in SFB 7. We all scratched our heads, as none of us recognised it and Zoe was particularly keen to get to the bottom of it!

This unusual bone is the ‘scute’ or bony scale of a Sturgeon

After a bit of research we discovered that we had a scute from a sturgeon, an enormous fish that is today endangered and famous for being the source of caviar. The ‘scute’ is part of the sturgeons bony protection, a little bit like armour plating, as it doesn’t have scales.

Sturgeon (Acipenser) at the Oregon Zoo (here used under a Creative Commons License)

Sturgeon have been known to grow as large as 5 metres long, but more commonly reach around 2m-3m, depending on the species. They are coastal and riverine bottom feeders. Sturgeon were highly prized in the late Saxon period and even now are part of the group known as ‘Royal Fish’ along with whales and porpoises, establishing that these fish are the property of the monarch when found or fished in the United Kingdom. Sturgeons in early Anglo-Saxon contexts are extremely rare, and this evidence suggests a settlement of great wealth and status at Lyminge in the pagan period – which entirely matches the archaeological evidence we have so far!

Alex and Andy record the pit full of flints and iron smelting slag

Finally, if you have been following the blog this season you will remember that I introduced you all to the very interesting pit full of large flint nodules and iron smelting evidence in the north east corner of our trench. This pit has been under excavation for some days now, and Alex had considered that he was nearly done!

We had always been intrigued by a dark clay ring around the edge of the pit. It turns out that what we had thought was the natural chalk bedrock was in fact a capping layer of chalk dumped in to the pit.

A section through the pit full of smelting slag – a chalk capping layer covers layers of clay and highly organic material. The sunshine makes photography at depth difficult! The ranging pole is 1m long.

Underneath this chalk was a very thick layer of clay and then an incredibly organic deposit that is full of animal bone and other organic waste. At the very bottom the articulated skeleton of a piglet was discovered, part of which you can see here. Further rib bones and other parts have been found since this photo was taken.

The bones of a piglet which would have been whole when it went in the ground come out of the very bottom of a large early Saxon pit that was full of iron smelting slag and flint nodules.

This sort of deposition is something we’re going to examine closely – it seems that the piglet has not been butchered and it is curious for a whole suckling pig to be disposed of in this manner. The association with smelting evidence gives us cause to think of ethnographic examples of rituals surrounding the smelting of iron, although it is very early to be thinking along these lines! The rarity of early Saxon pits is also an interesting issue to consider here.

I do hope you have been able to keep going through this mammoth post! We have just over a week of digging to go and a huge amount to do, so I will do my best to keep you all updated on Facebook and twitter as well as the blog with all finds and features as they are uncovered. Watch this space!

A final reminder that we do in fact have a third Timber Hall on site, here under excavation by Matthew, which may be of a similar size to the Great Hall discovered in 2012

Our trench on Tayne Field, taken from the spoil heap and facing towards the north

Digging has been progressing well here at Lyminge, with some of our hunches being proved through excavation, and others turning out to be quite different although still just as fascinating.

Busy day in the Lym13 trench

Ben, our trainee field supervisor, ploughs through a mountain of paperwork!

As you can see the trench is filled with volunteers and students. Postholes, SFBs and wall trenches are being carefully excavated and recorded. The paperwork generated seems overwelming at times as every last archaeological context is carefully described, drawn and photographed, but Rosie and Ben go through it carefully to make sure there are no errors and everyone’s training is up to scratch!

It’s very imporant that the records are as accurate as possible because once we have dug into a feature and examined the finds, we can’t put it back, and we need as much detail as possible to be able to reconstruct and write about the archaeology when we come to publish in the future.

The paper, photographic and drawn records form a detailed archive of everything we’ve dug here in Lyminge and can be referred to over and over in discussing and interpreting the archaeology.

Nicola takes levels (heights above sea level) for the tiny stake holes she discovered in the South East quadrant of SFB 7

Some very interesting features have come up over the past few days. The first sunken-featured building (SFB 7) that we began to excavated has been fully exavated in two quadrants, and is currently being meticulously recorded. Rosie E. and Nicola discovered very small stake holes in both their quadrants, which almost might have been missed but for us re-cleaning each quadrant carefully to make sure we hadn’t missed anything cut into the base of our SFB pit.

These stake holes may have been part of the internal structure of the building – whether they supported a raised floor or formed part of the support for a piece of furniture like a loom is a subject of great academic debate and our SFB adds to the interesting discussion!

Stake holes found by Rose E. in SFB 7.

The stake holes in Nicola’s quadrant aren’t the only interesting feature – we would usually expect one large post to support the roof at either end of the SFB, but you can see from the photo above (click to enlarge it) that behind Nicola there are three large post holes. It seems that extra support was required during the building’s lifetime – perhaps the roof started to sag?

SFB 6, the second sunken-featured building that we opened, is very different in character. It has been fully excavated in one quadrant, and you can see that we have a large pit cut into the bottom of it on one side, and potentially beam slots and a post hole on the other. The pit within the SFB pit itself is rather unusual. It was filled with very large pieces of quern stone, something we haven’t found in great quantities on Tayne Field before, but we

The south east quadrant in SFB 6 has a large pit cut into it, with several other features that could be beam slots and post holes.

have found plenty from the later monastic phase of the Anglo-Saxon settlement in our digs behind the church. We’re hopeful that taking down the other two quadrants will help to resolve this unusual pit placement. What’s particularly interesting about our two sunken-featured buildings is that Rose Broadley, our glass expert, has examined the glass and is able to say from preliminary analysis in the field that SFB 7 is 6th century in date, with SFB 6’s glass dating to the 7th century AD.

Zoe and her team on SFB 6 attempt to beat the sun and take a photograph of the fully excavated quadrant

Alex and Andy record in plan the pit containing extensive iron smelting material

A further area of interest is a very large pit-like feature that appeared after we finished excavating the clinker foundations of the WWII structures. This is a particulary interesting feature because it contains a very large amount of iron smelting slag, with huge pieces in the top of it. You can see the size of the flint nodules too (right). The density of flint is extremely unusual. Initial thoughts were that this might be a collapsed smelting furnace, but the quantity of unburnt flint and unfired daub is perhaps suggestive of more of a large rubbish pit which has been used as a dump for the remains of a furnace. However, yesterday we began to uncover what looked like post holes within the ‘pit’ so there may yet be a structure associated with this unusual feature. We’ll find out more as we go down, you can see that we have a little way to go yet!

Sean uses the computer to start the next section of radar scanning.

It’s not just the digging, of course! This week we are joined by David Thornley, who you may remember from one of the first blog posts that I wrote last year, when Dave and I did  geophysics (using resistivity) on Tayne Field. The wetness of the soil (remember last year’s rain?!) unfortunately meant that we didn’t pick up anything useful using resistivity, but this year Dave is back to try out Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) in the churchyard and inside the church in order to confirm Canon Jenkins’ 19th century excavation plans, and to see if we can pick anything else up in this area. Sean and Simon are helping Dave this time, learning how to use the equipment, and particularly because it is at least a two man job !

(l-r) Dave Thornley, Sean Doherty and Simon Maslin use Ground Penetrating Radar in the churchyard of Lyminge parish church

GPR uses radar to reach up to 3m underground and builds up a 3D picture of whatever is underneath the ground surface. As you can see it requires some very bulky but clever equipment! The data has yet to be processed so we’ll keep you posted on any developments.

Excavation of the two hall buildings is underway. Here you can see slots placed over wall trenches and post holes along the footprints of the two timber halls

Work proceeds on the wall trenches of the two timber hall structures. They are proving very complicated to disentangle but we are making progress! Some areas have to be continuously wetted down and  covered with tarpauline in order to keep the ground moist enough to see the features and be able to dig it! After a sunny day the ground bakes solid and it is extremely difficult to dig. In the photo on the left a complicated area has been watered and covered so we can give it a closer look later on.

Some of the post holes are shallow but contain a wealth of information. You can see here below the beautifully preserved daub in the post holes for the larger building, and some of the daub extracted has preserved wattle impressions and a whitewashed surface.

A cross-section through one of the post holes in the southern-end wall of the larger timber hall. You can see orange fired daub, suggestive of fire, and whiter unfired daub.

The larger timber hall appears to have been cut by the slightly narrower and smaller hall, perhaps a later replacement, but this may change as we open more slots over intercutting areas. Interpretations change and progress on a daily basis!

Jack cleans back the base of the post pit – he fits in with room to spare!

Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is the discovery of an extremely large post pit in the extension trench. We originally opened this area to establish if the World War II structures had disturbed any Anglo-Saxon archaeology. We found a line of late Medieval post holes and an enormous WWII rubbish pit full of rubbish from the demolition of the mess huts after the war ended, as well as the continuation of the Medieval ditch that crosses the whole site. In giving this area a good hard trowel over and in investigating a couple of what appeared to be smaller Saxon features, we began to see that there were one or two significant Anglo-Saxon features. One of these was given a closer look, and it was discovered that what we had thought was perhaps a smallish post hole or pit, was in fact an absolutely enormous post pit, larger than the post pits for the doorways of the Great Hall that we discovered last year!

This is an astonishing discovery, suggesting that a structure perhaps equalling in size last year’s Great Hall exists in the area towards Church road, on the highest part of the plateau on Tayne Field.

The substantial post-pit half-sectioned, with the flint packing for a very large post clearly visible

We have only revealed a very small area over this pit and wall trench, so it may seem rather speculative to talk of further halls of this size, but having a good understanding of last year’s archaeology means that we are in a good position to extrapolate a large structure from the post pit we have so far uncovered. This area will certainly be investigated in future digs, and it certainly once again changes our understanding of the Pre-Monastic settlement in Lyminge.

Jack plans the post pit and wall trench for the potentially extremely substantial building on the plateau of Tayne Field

With that in mind, don’t forget about our Open Day this Saturday 17th August, 10-4.30pm. Dr Gabor Thomas our site director, with support from myself, will be taking site tours at 11am, 1pm and 3pm so you can see the archaeological evidence for yourselves! Hope to see you there!

As promised, a blog post about some of the finds that have been coming up over the past two and a bit weeks, but also some of the other things that have been going on! We’ve had a whole range of things, of all sorts of dates but with a great emphasis on some early-mid Saxon items. This post should get you all up to date. Interpretation and excavation is in full swing, with Gabor and the team constantly revising our understanding of what’s going on in our trench.

Gabor and Keith discuss a portion of the site.

Some of you may have seen a few pictures on Twitter, which we set up for the project

The Lyminge Archaeological Project Twitter page

about a week ago. It’s been fun to have a new medium through which to share the daily life of the dig. I’ve been able to tweet pictures of what’s happening on site straight away, so do follow @LymingeDig if you are registered with Twitter. Even if you don’t have a Twitter account you can view our posts if you go to https://twitter.com/LymingeDig

Roman tile stamped with the makers name. A parallel exists from Richborough.

I try to put up pictures most days so you’ll get a few ‘action shots’ of what is going on the day, and links to other interesting projects and Saxon-related news. Two interesting finds that came up and were tweeted were this lovely piece of Roman stamped tile, with a parallel from Richborough, and our horse. We do get the odd Roman find but they aren’t particularly common and we have no Roman features on site at Lyminge, so it’s very interesting to see items such as this tile come up.

Many of you will remember that last season we found a horse’s skull and vertebrae at the end of a Saxo-Norman ditch. This season we opened up the continuation of that ditch and were lucky to discover that the whole horse had been placed within the ditch. It was carefully excavated and lifted by Pete and Les, local volunteers who worked on it last year. From the photo you can see that it is in a very awkward position, lying on its back, perhaps just rolled in to the ditch when the horse potentially died of disease, as it seems to have been relatively young when it died.

Peter Butcher excavates the horse, which is lying on its back.

Cordelia was tasked with washing the horse skeleton, which was remarkably unfragmented.

It’s already been carefully washed and lifted by Cordelia, and will be examined by Zoe to check for pathologies and sex and any other stories that might be contained within its bones.

I mentioned last time that we had local resident and producer/cameraman Steve Thomas doing some filming on site for our archive and any potential television programmes in the future. We’ve got some great stills from his footage so far which show some of the finds beautifully. In the first week of machining of the topsoil to reveal the archaeology we discovered this lovely miniature radiate brooch, below, which Steve filmed.

A miniature radiate brooch found in the topsoil when machining. It is chip carved and gilded, and although it is broken it is still in great condition.

Similar brooches were found in the Lyminge Saxon cemetery a number of years ago, so we have nice comparative evidence from the two different types of sites almost certain to be contemporary to one another.

The high status artefacts have continued, with nearly thirty fragments of glass found this season already. This is a really astonishing number of fragments from a settlement site, especially considering that we are not even half-way through the dig at this stage.
Here you can see the array of colours and types. Most Saxon vessel glass comes from funerary assemblages, so it is great to see that it is used (and broken!) in daily life. Broken glass would usually have been recycled which is why it is quite rare.

Just a few of the high status vessel glass fragments we have been finding this season

The sunken-featured buildings (SFBs) continue to be productive. We opened the second of our three yesterday, and almost immediately began to come up with finds.

A tiny amethyst bead was excavated from SFB 6. It’s less than 1cm in length.

The star find of yesterday was this lovely but absolutely tiny amethyst bead (left), a particularly special find considering Kent’s role in amethyst trade. Amethyst is incredibly rare, although when found it tends to be found in 7th century contexts, so is helpful for dating. Ultimately, amethyst comes from the east, traded from places like India. Kent is at the opposite end of that trade route, and likely the amethyst found in Kent (exceptionally rare) is traded via Frankia’s extensive links.

A lovely piece of raw amber, found in SFB 7 and measuring around 1.5cm long.

Further examples of this extensive trade across Europe can be seen in this piece of amber also found in an SFB. Amber is reasonably rare, and usually found in the form of beads. This is a raw piece, and would have originally come from the Baltic. These sorts of items help us to understand that the so-called Dark Ages were really full of contacts and activity, with a people full of knowledge about the wider world.

Anglo-Saxon small long brooch from SFB 6, fresh out of the ground.

It’s not just amethyst and amber, we have glass beads and even another Saxon brooch. This brooch (left) came out this morning from SFB 6, and is in near perfect condition although it is missing its pin.

Today we finally started work on the large Timber Hall that I have mentioned in previous posts. Keith and a few volunteers are putting slots over the less complicated areas of the building’s wall trenches to establish what the wall trenches are supposed to look like when not encroached by other features and structures. This will make it easier when we come to disentangle the areas which have very complicated stratigraphy.

In the first half hour of digging Keith found a lovely fragment of double-sided bone comb in his portion of wall trench, so we have high hopes for more finds associated with the building. I’ll put a picture up when it’s looking more photogenic!

Keith and a small team get started on the wall trenches of the c.15m long Timber Hall in this year’s trench

As you can see, finds and features have been coming up thick and fast! We also have some other activities going on on site however, with the visit of Professor Martin Bell (from the University of Reading) to do some coring all the way down to the stream being a highlight for those students interested in environmental sampling.

Professor Martin Bell shows Sofia and Luke how to use an auger

Martin examines a core

Students and volunteers have gone down with Martin and Simon to the source of the Nailbourne that surrounds Tayne Field to take cores using an auger and learn all about this type of scientific sampling. They’re taking samples all the way from our trench down to the stream to establish the depth of the chalk bedrock and things such as whether stream has moved over time and if any archaeology is present closer to the stream.

David Mudd holding the measuring staff

Part of the team are also engaged in working out height above sea level and location of the coring samples so that we can accurately record the samples in relation to this and last year’s trenches.

David Mudd demonstrates excellent staff handling skills and Tom and Richard take readings from the staff using a dumpy level to find height above sea level – the height has been worked out by the Ordnance Survey and recorded on the outside wall of the pub!

Tom and Richard take levels for the auguring

You can see that there has been an awful lot going on over the last week or so! We still have a huge amount to do but steady progress is being made and everyone is getting stuck in and is well used to our recording system. There are a great many finds (some more below) and I will try to keep you up to date!

A spindle whorl (left) and an unfinished pin beater (for tightening the threads in weaving)

New students arrive on the weekend and some leave us after a very exciting few weeks. Do remember if you want to volunteer that we only have two more inductions available, as we do not run them in the last two weeks of the dig. This Saturday 10th August and the following Wednesday morning are the remaining dates.

Email comms@lymingearchaeology.org to book an induction or speak to a supervisor on site if you are in the area!

A beautiful copper alloy dress pin from early on in the excavation

Everyone finally gets started digging into features after hand cleaning the trench for over a week.

Lots and lots has been going on on the Lyminge dig in the past week! We’ve been extremely busy with a whole range of activities, and today we finally finished the last of the cleaning back and students and volunteers began to excavate into archaeological features. A whole host of archaeology has been revealed in hand cleaning, from Second World War mess hut foundations, Medieval ditches and Saxo-Norman pits, through to some top notch Anglo-Saxon archaeology.

We’ve had local metal detectorists come and check over our spoil heap – things in the

Bethany interviews Barry and Maurice, metal detectorists who help us on site.

topsoil sometimes get missed in the machining of the site and as well as our usual detectorists Steve Harmer and David Holman, Barry and Maurice who are very experienced detectorists joined us this year.

We finished cleaning back and put up the photo tower to get shots of the site pre-excavation. This was the cue for the sun to come out and of course the best archaeological photography needs a bit of cloud cover! You can clearly see the clinker foundations of the WWII structures which were built as mess huts for soldiers posted in the village, and demolished after the war.

The North west corner of the trench, (taken from the photo tower) contains the regularly rectangular clinker foundations of WWII mess huts.

The other features are a little more difficult to pick out! You can see in the photo above that there are some rectangular dark shapes, and the two furthest of these are two sunken-featured buildings (SFBs), small timber buildings that were built over a rectangular pit. After they were demolished they were back-filled with rubbish and midden material, sometimes with whole objects placed such as the plough coulter found in 2010 in the bottom of an SFB.

In the photo below you can see the first proper glimpse of our second large timber hall! The wall trenches are difficult to see but in the foreground is the southern end wall trench, with several post holes with packing material in them along the way. The whole building is cut through by a dark line in the middle which is a Medieval ditch as well as several other features, but it seems we have the majority of the building, at around 15m long by 8m wide. The north end wall trench is just before the large dark rectangle, one of the SFBs. In future photos it will be easier to see as we begin to excavate into the walls. There is also another potential timber building cutting this hall structure, but it is very difficult to show it to you in these shots! I’ll keep you updated as we begin to disentangle the jumble of features in this area of the site.

Photo tower shot from the south up the long axis of our second timber hall. SFB 7 is the dark rectangle at the far end of the trench.

The other thing we were able to do just before beginning excavation was to get local

Bill Laing (right) and Keith Dorman get the drone flying for photos while Gabor observes.

resident William Laing in with his new and improved helicopter drone! Bill provided us the fantastic aerial shots of the Great Hall last year and this year his kit has a tracking device and relays video back to a screen on the ground. This shot using a fish eye lens gets almost all the site in (it was too windy to go any higher) and you can pick out a whole host of archaeology.

A great test shot from Bill Laing’s new and improved helicopter drone.

Tom and Les investigate the river pebbles in the stream that surrounds Tayne Field – the source of the River Nailbourne

In revealing the features and finishing the cleaning we began to notice that lots of the dark areas of archaeology had pebbles in them, something we didn’t seem to have in last year’s trench. We immediately began to wonder where these pebbles were coming from, as they don’t occur naturally in the chalk and clay natural geology of Tayne Field. Tom Lawrence is doing his dissertation on the mesolithic flint assemblage from Lyminge, and went down to the stream at the bottom of Tayne Field to investigate the geology of

Tom Lawrence examines the stream for a potential source of the pebbles on site.

the riverbed with Les Moorman, one of our local volunteers. After a bit of rummaging in the undergrowth, they found almost exactly the same pebbles, and although we have yet to investigate these ‘pebbly’ features, it seems we have found the very local source for the stones!

We opened one of our SFBs yesterday and we’re already starting to get interesting things out of it –  Anglo-Saxon pottery and Roman metal fittings. There’ll be a separate ‘finds’ post soon to show you the kinds of things we’re getting up across site, but although we’ve started slow on the finds front we certainly won’t be short on them in the next few days! The finds team will have plenty to do! We already have some exciting looking pieces of glass which is indicative of high status lifestyles such as we have found in past seasons of digging in Lyminge.

Beginning excavation of SFB 7 – Charlotte and Ross get stuck in.

Finally, I want to show you some of the impact we’re having in the village on a ‘younger’ scale! Andy Macintosh is one of our supervisors on site, and he works for Canterbury Archaeological Trust. At CAT he often works with education and outreach, and this year at the beginning of the dig he went into Lyminge Primary School to tell the schoolchildren all about the dig and introduce them to the Anglo-Saxons.

Andy does an assembly at Lyminge Primary about the dig which is right on the school’s doorstep.

Showing the children Saxon artefacts

As you can see from the photos, the day went really well and although most of the dig occurs in the school holidays the children were able to come and see the 360 plant digger stripping the site before we began, which the little ones were particularly excited about! We’re really pleased that we can share the results of our project with everyone in the village and indeed those further afield too. If you are interested in bringing your children to the dig we have an open day on the 17th August with lots of things for children to do and see, as well as Saxon re-enactments too, and I will post more information about it very soon. Check back for blog updates very soon!

Enjoying Andy’s school session!

Just a quick post to say that we took part in the ‘Day of Archaeology‘ today, a project that asks archaeologists from all over the world to blog about all the different things they do across the whole spectrum of archaeological research. Have a look here for what we got up to today!

Day of Archaeology 2013 website, with our post at the top (but not for long!)

Welcome to the first in-the-field blog post of 2013! Last Thursday we began stripping the site by machine in anticipation of beginning bright and early on Monday morning. It was great to have the machining finished to be able to put people on site straight away.

Gabor and Zoe watch the stripping of the site – machine driven expertly by Neil Mullins!

Students and local volunteers line up and clean back the whole trench

Our students and volunteers have braved the hot sun and the concreted clay in the trench and are making amazing progress with clearing away the loose spoil and scraping back the clay to reveal the archaeology beneath.

We have a few new staff members to introduce you to! The rest of the team was introduced last year and we’ve nearly all returned. First up is Zoe Knapp, who is getting settled in as a new site supervisor. Zoe is a zooarchaeology specialist, and is doing a PhD at the University of Reading on the animal bone assemblage from Lyminge.

Zoe Knapp joins us both as a PhD student in the zooarchaeology of Lyminge, and as a site supervisor

She has extensive field experience having been a supervisor at Sedgeford and we’re delighted to have her on the project.

We are also joined by Stuart Hunnisett as our new logistics manager. Stuart was a very hardworking volunteer on the project last year and is also a local resident, and when the position became vacant we asked him to come on board.

This year we also have two assistant supervisors on board – Ben Parker joins us as assistant field supervisor and Emily Harwood as assistant finds supervisor. Both Ben and Emily are students at the University of Kent and were with us last year so know the site really well. We’re really pleased to have them back and in two of the trainee roles for students that we are able to offer.

Emily Harwood is our new finds assistant

Ben Parker is our new assistant site supervisor

This year we have a dedicated visitor liaison, Bethany Wood

Finally, we are extremely pleased to have Bethany Wood join us this year in a new post for the project. Bethany is an undergraduate student at the University of Reading and is in charge of visitors services and public outreach on site. If you are walking by or visiting the site directly Bethany will be on hand throughout the dig to explain to you what is happening and what we’ve been finding.

She is also undertaking a project for her dissertation to find out how much impact we are having on the local area and enhance public engagement, so if you are visiting the site she will be delighted to chat to you about how you found out about the dig and what you have learned. If you’re volunteering on the dig then she’ll almsot certainly grab you to talk about your experience as a volunteer at Lyminge!

Our trench from the spoil heap.

As I write, the trench is being cleaned back by hand to reveal the archaeology. We experienced some pretty unusual weather with the high temperatures this week and last,

Ben and Roo debate the best ways to attach a hose

which has meant that machining and cleaning back the site has been particularly difficult. The natural geology on Tayne Field is clay on top of chalk, and the clay bakes very hard in the hot sun. This means that when we attempt to hand-clean the site using trowels and mattocks, it’s like troweling cement! It makes it very difficult to see the different colours of the archaeological features and we have to water the site a great deal and cover the areas we aren’t working on in black plastic to keep it damp. Today we finally have some cooler weather and the site isn’t drying out too quickly – features and finds are much easier to see and we are revealing some very interesting archaeology.

In machining and cleaning back we began to see archaeology almost immediately. Already we have located the other ends of the Saxo-Norman ditches revealed in last year’s dig. Our trench this year is immediately adjacent to the 2012 trench, to the north. We have also revealed the foundations of two of the World War II mess huts that were located on Tayne Field. We’re going to be recording these foundations just as carefully as anything else on site, and investigating to see if any Anglo-Saxon archaeology lies underneath.

Cleaning back the trench, with plastic to keep the ground damp

Those of you that followed the blog last year will remember that we had what’s known as a ‘sunken-featured building’ (SFB), which was packed full of exciting early Anglo-Saxon finds. This year it looks like we have two definite SFBs and perhaps a third, which will certainly keep us busy! We also are starting to see that we might have a timber hall on a north-south orientation – we have postholes and possible wall trenches in the right places so I will keep you posted on progress in this area! I’ll be writing about all these features very soon

Don’t forget that although we have official site tours of the dig every Saturday at 2pm you can visit at any time and Bethany will answer your questions and show you round!

Our director, Gabor Thomas, gets stuck in to the trench cleaning operation!

It seems that very suddenly, there is just under a week before the 2013 dig season begins! It it is very definitely a whole year since I started blogging about our excavations on Tayne Field – time has whistled by!

A view of Tayne Field from the church tower, where our dig takes place for the second year running.

The project office here at the University of Reading has been a hive of activity organising all the things we need to take down to the dig. Gabor and I are going down to Lyminge tomorrow to get everything prepared, and to begin stripping the site. Staff and students are arriving over the weekend, to start bright and early on Monday 22nd July!

New volunteers who have signed up to the very first induction begin on Wednesday 24th July, and there are still a few spaces on the inductions later on in the season – have a look at the ‘taking part’ page in the menu at the top of this page for more information on how to get involved. If you have volunteered before you don’t need another induction, but can devote as much or as little time as you have available to help out over the season.

This season our 30x30m trench will be immediately adjacent and to the north of last year’s trench. Considering the importance of the finds we made last year, especially the ‘Great Hall’, expectations are high here in the office, and we’re all itching to get out and see what this season will bring.

I’ll be blogging as much as I can over the next six or seven weeks to keep you up to date with all the exciting finds we hope to make this summer, so do keep checking back and if you can, visit us! The website will be updated regulary with events and information, so we hope to see as many of you as can make it on our site tours (2pm each Saturday) and our Open Day on Saturday 17th August.

Please do also feel free leave comments and feedback on the blog – we love hearing from visitors and those who have been keeping up with the posts. We hope to see you in Lyminge!

We’re all looking forward to being back in beautiful Lyminge