Category Archives: Project Supervisors

“Marion”: The Bourne Head Pot

By Feenagh Johnson, Project Supervisor

At the end of last year, Allen Archaeology (Marine division) undertook a small excavation in the Market Town of Bourne, Lincolnshire.

The site at Bourne

Now I maybe biased, having grown up a mere stone’s throw away, but I already thought the site was pretty exciting… and then this little lady turned up in the first excavated feature. She was covered in mud and in many fragments but enough of her features were visible to identify a face, and it was the unusual form of her hair that gave her the nickname “Marion” (as the frills looked like a medieval headdress).

Finding Marion

A muddy Marion

Although similar to their better known cousins, the face pot, head pots are usually made of a fine fabric with the body of the vessel moulded into the form of human head. Their exact nature is uncertain but it has been postulated that they are ritual vessels, with another notable Lincolnshire example, the “DON MERCVRIO” head pot, being dedicated to the cult of Mercury.

The fully cleaned headpot

However, the Bourne Head pot is unique; she is beautifully hand painted with a distinct hair style and facial features. It’s very possible that the vessel was “made to order” sometime in the 4th century AD, and it would be nice to think that she was modelled after an actual person before being ritually deposited… unfortunately we can only hypothesize!

illustration by C Bentley

Find of the month October – a Roman buckle

Roman buckle

By Yvonne Rose, Archives Supervisor with Mike Wood, Project Manager and Finds Specialist

Our find of the month for October is a rather nice example of a Roman buckle. This type of triangular-shaped buckle dates to the second half of the 4^th century and is found at predominantly military sites in Britain. Indeed, ours was found in Lincoln, just outside the east wall of the Roman city. In this period of history, buckles are still a relatively rare find, much less common than brooches.

The buckle was discovered together with other artefacts in the grave of an adult male. The other associated objects include a crossbow brooch, a small silver mount, a fragment of decorated copper strip which could be part of another brooch, the broken plate of a further buckle, as well as 10 iron nails which may indicate the presence of a coffin. All of these objects are typical of the burials of males from positions of authority in the late Roman Empire.

Buckles with triangular plates are known from both the late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods. Roman ones usually have openwork plates with D-shaped or, as with ours, kidney-shaped frames; whereas the Saxon ones tend more towards oval frames and solid plates.

The buckle is made from cast copper alloy and measures 50mm in length. The pin is present, as are three copper alloy rivets, one in each corner of the plate. From the junction with the frame, the arms of the plate extend to meet at a cleft terminal lobe with a pointed projection either side. The heart-shaped aperture of this buckle is particularly attractive.

German archaeologist H. W. Böhme studied buckles with integral triangular plates as part of his survey of late Roman artefacts in Britain, and the settlement of England by the earliest Anglo-Saxons (Böhme 1986, Liste 1, Abb. 5, Abb. 14). He dated them to the middle or second half of the 4th century and his map shows that they are found in small numbers not only in the British Isles but also along the European frontier of the Roman Empire, along the Rhine and Danube rivers.

Böhme, H W, 1986, Das Ende der Römerherrschaft in Britannien und die Angelsächische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 33 pt. 2

Find of the month: September – a Roman bangle

Roman glass bangle

Yvonne Rose, Archives Supervisor and Mike Wood, Project Manager and Finds Specialist

Our find of the month for September is this spectacular fragment of glass bangle, found in the rather unremarkable setting of a ditch fill in North Lincolnshire.

This is a Kilbride Type 2, named after H. E. Kilbride-Jones who, in 1938, created a detailed typology of early Roman glass bangles. The Type 2 bangles are characterised by having from one to three narrow, twisted cables, generally blue and white, fused lengthwise onto a translucent core, most commonly ice-green or blue, but occasionally colourless. They are usually D-shaped or triangular in section. If it had been complete, our bangle would have had an internal diameter of approximately 60mm.

Bangles of all materials are most common in Britain during the 4th century. The major exception to this are the coloured glass bangles which, by contrast, appear to have been at the height of fashion in the earlier centuries of Roman occupation in Britain. Despite their relatively short lifespan, there are many examples of this type of bangle in the north of England, and even Scotland. Recent work has indicated that this type has been found on several sites north of the Humber in the former Parisi territory. It has been suggested that they may have been manufactured in Roman forts, using raw materials brought over from the continent, and this would explain the spread northwards.

There has been some debate about what precisely these glass rings were used for, and whether all of them were worn as arm or leg ornaments. It has been suggested that some of the broken fragments appear to have had a value as amulets of some sort, with an example found deposited with a cache of stones, fossils and other coloured glass objects in an empty burial cist in a prehistoric cairn at Cairnhill, Aberdeenshire. However, the most commonly accepted theory is that they were used as anklets, armlets, bracelets or possibly even for tying up hair.

Best site hut biscuit with Charlotte

What is your job role?
Project Supervisor

How long have you worked for Allen Archaeology?
I started working for AAL in October 2013, so three and a half yearsish?

How would describe your excavation technique?
A fellow colleague once told me that if my digging style was an animal, it would be a ‘Chattering Brummy Peacock’

How long have you been working in archaeology?
My first commercial job was with Wessex Archaeology in Salisbury in July 2013

How did you get into archaeology?
I took a break from education after finishing my A-levels because I had no clue what I wanted to do. During the first few months of part-time supermarket checkout worker boredom I watched A LOT of Time Team episodes and decided to give it a go.

What is the best thing about your job?
Working out the story of a site. Finding Quernstones (Oh, and sitting opposite the handsome specimen that is Roger Evershed in the office)

Specialist skills?
Inventor of the infamous ‘Mud or Poo’ game, which I now hear is sweeping the nation. Founder and CEO of ‘Gin Wednesdays’…and I quite like Earthwork Surveying

Mud or poo?

Best site hut biscuit?
Milk Chocolate Digestive… Every. Single. Time.

Best site hut biscuit with Feenagh

Excavating a skeleton in October 2014

What is your job role?
Project Supervisor

How long have you worked for Allen Archaeology?
I started working for AAL in September 2013

How would describe your excavation technique?
Erratic – It’s a messy process, but normally produces good results!

How long have you been working in archaeology?
Since September 2013!

How did you get into archaeology?
Through a love of history, a burning desire not to work inside and just a little bit of luck I guess.

What is the best thing about your job?
The community aspects of it. I’ve been lucky enough to work on a few of our recent community projects and I love the buzz you get from engaging with the public and talking about archaeology. We have a pretty cool job and it’s nice to show it off!

…Also mud.

Specialist skills?
The ability to turn any conversation into one about cats??!

Best site hut biscuit?
The digestive. It’s a good honest biscuit that isn’t afraid of a little bit of tea.
Or a Custard Cream if I’m feeling fancy…

Running a large scale excavation

Dan Connor, Project Supervisor

In this blog I have been asked to try and describe what my experience running a large scale excavation was like. I have been a supervisor at Allen Archaeology since November 2014 and have worked here since October 2013. Prior to working at Market Harborough I ran several evaluation trenching sites, some open area excavations and helped supervise the large-scale North Killingholme site under the direction of Chris Casswell in the summer of 2015; this would be the largest site I have coordinated.

General shot of site on top of the spoil heap looking southeast

So, a quick description of the site, Market Harborough was an agricultural field, about 5.5 hectares in size that underwent a strip map and record, during the summer of 2016. This was done as a condition of planning consent to allow the building of over 100 houses on the site. Prior to us starting work the site a geophysical survey and evaluation trenching had been undertaken. This meant that there were known archaeological remains on the site consisting of field boundaries and enclosures, that were shown clearly on the geophysics. The nature of these results suggested that this site would have a mix of Romano-British field systems and some earlier Iron Age features.

The geophysics results for the site

Machines started opening the site up in early March, and after a few teething issues we were largely ready to go.

Pre-excavation survey of the site, showing the archaeology and other features.

One of the excavated ditches

It was daunting at first, a large tangle of intercutting ditches and discrete features over an area the size of four football fields; but breaking it down made it much easier to grasp. In the end I decided to have the team work through the site in a large group, breaking the site down into distinct parts and moving from one area to the next. It often feels like Roman archaeology leads itself to this approach as Romans loved squares and enclosures and like to keep things surrounded by big ditches. Difficulties arose however with the Romans love of maintaining said big ditches, then leaving them, before digging new ditches in exactly the same place. This results in features having multiple re-cuts and phases, and the key was to try and link these phases together. This is what makes Roman sites fascinating; distinct phases of activity and occupation can be observed, and in this case it emerged that there were five clear phases of activity, despite the complexity in the features.

The earliest period of occupation recorded on the site dated from the early Neolithic, with several pits that contained worked flint including a fragment of a leaf shaped arrowhead, and a piece of a Langdale stone axe in the northwest corner of the site. A prehistoric pit alignment was found oriented north to south and is similar to others found in Leicestershire. Also recorded were the remains of at least two Iron age drip gullies associated with round houses.

The majority of the site was, as expected, Romano-British field systems and enclosures. We had a number of stand out finds from this period including a partial sliver ring, a copper alloy make up tool, a brooch and multiple quern stones including a rotary and saddle quern.

The whole site with complete stratigraphic phasing, red being earlier and blue being later.

The whole site with complete stratigraphic phasing, red being earlier features and blue, more recent

However there was not just the archaeology to consider, a large-scale project like this meant public interest, I had had a little experience with this working at North Killingholme, but this was my first experience of being directly involved. An open day was organised and volunteer groups from local historical societies were invited to work a few days.

On the open day, just over 70 people turned up for a site tour and to look at some of the material we had found. I found that while people enjoyed their time most were expecting more of a traditional/research archaeological site and less of a “construction” image. I imagine not looking like a university professor did not match many people’s expectations, neither did the hard hats and high visibility vests everyone was wearing. Regardless many local people had real enthusiasm about the work we were doing and a genuine interest in the artefacts. Many were eager to add their own interpretations to what we had found and what could have been there.

Volunteers from local historical societies were invited to come onto site and excavate some of the features, specifically some of the pits in the pit alignment. A big difference that the volunteers noted themselves was the amount of work and the speed it was expected to be done at. It is a long time since my university field schools and I have only worked on commercial archaeological sites since, so having volunteers was a bit of an unknown quantity. I enjoyed having them on site though and I believe they learnt a bit about what digging for a company was like and the benefits of doing volunteer work.

Bees played a bigger part of my time then I thought they would, with a hive descending on to the site during July

Bees played a bigger part of my time than I thought they would, with a swarm descending on to the site during July!

Most people were working away from home on this job and that can be stressful. We seemed to avoid this, and I think it was because people got along socially as well as at work. Cooking together in the evening, playing board games and *a couple* of beers in the evening helped pass the time and brought people together. It created a good atmosphere and I felt everyone was enjoying working on the site.

Over 580 holes were excavated, over 3100 context numbers assigned and just under 1200 drawings were completed to investigate this part of a Romano-British settlement. It was a great site to work on; archaeologically it was interesting fitting the development of the site together alongside some nice finds, with evidence of extended occupation from the Neolithic to the 4th century AD. The group of people working on site really pulled it together. It made running what could have been a very stressful and complex site straight forward for me and resulted in a site I have found fascinating to record.

The team working hard

A cold week for archaeologists

It’s been a busy week and we’ve been up to all sorts of exciting things.

Aaron has been monitoring work at The Lawn in Lincoln.

On site at The Lawn

Damian has taken a team down to London

Monitoring works in London

Rob has been hunting the Loch Ness Monster in his magnetometry data

Finding monsters

Jesse has been undertaking and processing his first building survey

Setting up his first building survey

Alice has been working hard in the sleet

Team in the south of Lincolnshire

Reports are getting produced in the very tidy projects room

Working hard in the projects office

Finally we’ve had a team hard at it washing finds

Finds washers are going strong

Hope everyone else has had a busy week!

Find of the month: bricks need love too

I have been asked to write a post about January’s exciting Find of the Month, which is a small collection of bricks taken from one of our recent sites. I’m guessing they have been chosen as find of the month not because they’re nicer than anything else we found in January, but in order to give me a chance to write a follow up to my previous blog post about post-medieval archaeology.

Hand moulded 18th-19th century brick

The bricks in question cover a range of dates from the late 18th to the mid 20th century and so the techniques used for making the bricks change from hand moulding to machine pressing. This alone can be a good indicator of the date of brick structures, as machine moulded brick came to predominate in the second half of the 19th century. Among hand moulded bricks, the size of the brick can sometimes be helpful in suggesting how old the brick might be. For example, a brick tax was imposed in Britain in 1784, but was charged on the number of bricks, rather than by weight. The natural response of the brickmakers was to make larger bricks, charge more for them, and pay as little tax as possible! There is a tendency for hand pressed bricks to increase in size from the introduction of the brick tax until its repeal in 1850.

Dating of machine pressed bricks is of course helped by the fact that they are often stamped with the name of the manufacturer. Historical research into the brickworks itself, and the stamps used at different periods of its existence, can be used to indicate when and where the bricks were produced.

Handmade tapered header brick

Information can also be gleaned from the forms of bricks found on site. This is a handmade tapered header brick, a type of brick used in the construction of vaulted structures. Bricks like this would be an unusual find in a domestic context, and normally indicate the presence of structures such as drainage culverts or flues associated with industrial activity.

So, whilst it’s easy for all the prehistorians here to laugh at those of us who appreciate bricks, on a complex, multi-phase industrial site the bricks used in the construction of the buildings can be an invaluable resource, at least as important as all their pots and stones!

Four Calling Birds

Four Calling Birds is a slightly complicated find to track down. While Calling Birds could be a type of Songbird in the case of the song it is also thought to be a variation on the original of Colly bird; a blackbird. Unfortunately we have neither of these in the archive, and there are a lot of birds in this song….

Instead we have decided to stick with the idea of calling bird and have selected this little bell.

A small bell

Feature image recreated from Xavier Romero-Frias https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:XRF_12days.jpg under CC license