We’ve been having some technical difficulties and haven’t been able to post for a couple of days – but the digging has been progressing nicely all the same!
Day 14 (Tuesday) saw lots of visitors : in the morning the dig was open to local residents to visit, and in the afternoon members of the Avebury & Stonehenge Archaeological & Historical Research Group (ASAHRG) and of the Stonehenge & Avebury World Heritage Site Steering committees visited. One of the ASAHRG members even kindly supplied cake, which looked curiously like a certain ancient monument ….
Tuesday also saw the appearance of two new artefact types: a medieval coin, not yet fully identified, and a new type of pottery: Fengate Ware.
Fengate Ware is a type of Peterborough Ware and dates from around 5000 years ago, so is Middle Neolithic and goes with a lot of the other things we’ve been finding. Alexander Keiller found sherds of several vessels in his excavations 80 years ago on the same site. It’s not that common, partly because the pottery is often rather friable and doesn’t survive as well as Mortlake Ware or Ebbsfleet Ware, which are the other types of Peterborough Ware, so it’s really nice to get these sherds. The photograph shows the outside of the vessel, which seems to be decorated with rows of short incised lines, in a sort of herringbone design.
At the point when Josh was taking it out of ground we didn’t know what sort of pottery it was and it was really quite exciting – you can never have too much pottery, I say, as long as it’s Neolithic.
Day 15 (Wednesday) saw more of what is probably the same Fengate Ware vessel come up, and it became obvious that it has some incised decoration on the inside as well as the outside.
Work also continued on a small new trench to the south-east, on the far (eastern) side of the Avenue, but wasn’t very far advanced at the end of the day.
Not long to go now.