A busy day on site today with a full house team working on all areas of the site. The base of the ditch in the first segment through the ring ditch was found this morning, and a sample taken of the fill at the base. We also found a useful piece of animal bone in the earliest fill, which may be useful for giving a carbon date for the earliest chalky silt deposits that began to settle in the ditch.
Once the base of the ditch was reached, work began to clean and photograph the sections ready for recording. Again we were able to see the wide flat base of the ring ditch, which is perhaps one of the biggest we have seen in Thanet. The depth of the feature presented some problems getting in and out of the steep sided cut, which required specialist equipment – a set of step ladders.
The ditch was comparable the the huge ditches we saw on an excavation by the Trust andĀ Archaeology South East some years ago at Bradstow School in Broadstairs, which were probably the best preserved ring ditch profiles we had seen cut into the chalk geology. The ditch at Bradstow school had a causeway entrance and was unlikely to have been made as a round barrow and was more like a henge like feature. Perhaps the scale of our feature should lead us to think more about what it was built for.
Another fine job of cleaning and photography will let us think about this feature more when the excavation is over and we consider what we have learned from our work.
We also began the process of planning the large ring ditch segments using a series of survey strings recording the edges and breaks of slope of the features with our Total Station. There’s a lot of work over the next day or two to fill out the plan of the site and locate the excavated and drawn sections.
In a segment at the intersection of the ditch and the later feature on the northern side we have begun to find some pottery at last, with one or two sherds well stratified in the upper fill. Although this very mixed late deposit appears to have quite a wide range of material, including Iron Age and possibly some Roman.
At the southern end of the site, we continued to explore a segment (now numbered 5) which is attempting to discover the dimensions of the large cut feature that was cut into the barrow. Surprisingly the steep sides of the inner cut suggests the feature is much larger than we anticipated.
Just at the base we have started to reach a deposit of fine ashy material, perhaps this can give us some clues about its origin, although the date remains difficult to establish as we still do not have any more substantial dating evidence.
A visit from our favourite ceramic specialist has suggested that the ceramic handle we discoveredĀ a few days ago in the upper fill of segment 2 through the ring ditch, may in fact be Roman. However, a small rim sherd found in the same deposit further south is medieval Canterbury Sandy ware! A very mixed picture and more thought needs to go into the formation of the upper fill. Plenty more to do in our last few days on the dig…