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Written by Jemima Woolverton

Published: 20 October 2015

James Dilley of Ancient Craft lead two courses in Flint Knapping Demonstration and Workshop back in May. His guide on flint tools through the ages, and a step by step guide to flintknapping, is now available for download here.

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Written by Jemima Woolverton

Published: 17 September 2015

In September 2014 we lead a fieldwalking training course in Covington village investigating a piece of land which Covington History Group hadn't previously investigated. We surveyed the field in 20m gridsquares, trying to spend an equal amount of time within each square to make it a representative sample. The report is now out, and is free to download from OA Library. Please note that this is a good place to find many of Oxford Archaeology's grey literature excavation reports.

We're currently working on the Training Dig report from Covington this July. We've received our pottery and animal bone reports, and have some very interesting conclusions! More information to come as we analyse the results...

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Written by Jemima Woolverton

Published: 06 October 2015

Members of the Great Fen Archaeology Group and other Jigsaw metal detectorists have been assisting Oxford Archaeology archaeologists this week in the excavation of a Spitfire in the Great Fen. Jo Richards and Jemima Woolverton, Jigsaw's Community Archaeologists, have also been on site to work with these volunteers and assist in the excavation. Volunteers have been metal detecting around the crash site (identified by earlier geophysical survey and metal detecting) to recover aircraft debris and build up a picture of how the aircraft crashed. Each find is given a number and its position marked by GPS. They are also metal detecting the spoilheaps generated by the main excavation to recover further artefacts. Finds so far include scraps of aluminium and ammunition. For further updates, keep an eye on the Oxford Archaeology website.

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Written by Jemima Woolverton

Published: 17 July 2015

17 July

Well, that's all folks! Todays hard-working team cracked on with the final lot of recording and excavating of features. We had a few surprises as well!

Mick's trench at the top of the field continues to surprise us. It now looks like we have a pond at one end (including well-preserved egg shell!), and various ditches and pits at the other end of the field. However, on closer inspection, it looks like the pits and ditches aren't sitting on top of natural, as we thought, but are dug into a redeposited natural - probably from when the pond was dug. Accordingly, under our 'natural' we have a layer of buried soil.

Simon augered the buried soil (see above), and it came out green. 'Aha! Cess pit!' we thought. But we haven't really found anything in it, apart from the odd piece of bone, and you'd expect people to lose things down the loo. So we're now wondering whether it's a daub pit. It smells foul, but since daub is made from horse poo, it figures.

Phil's trench also continues to surprise. The geophysics suggested there was a ditch in his trench, but not one as big or as deep as the one he's uncovered! The following (rather terrible) picture gives some idea of the scale of it - about 4m wide and 2m deep. We think there are several ditches going on here - maybe an early Roman one, followed by a Medieval or Saxon boundary ditch. This ties in with an old 18th century map which shows moats in this field at roughly the point of our trench - and our ditch also lines up with the earthworks in the adjacent field. Maybe it enclosed the Saxon or Medieval manor house!

It's a shame we can't dig the whole field really, there's just so much going on. We'll be writing up a report over the next few months, which will be available as grey literature and downloadable for free from the OA Library: https://library.thehumanjourney.net/ We'll keep you posted. In the meantime, thanks to all who took part, and keep on digging!