Welcome to the first official update from Milton!
After the stripping of topsoil along the northwest side of the site, the excavation has moved ahead with speed. The weather has done its best to thwart us lately, but our archaeological team is a tough (if wet) bunch and we’re now making good progress to enable further stripping of the site.
So, what’s been coming out of the ground?
Rather excitingly, we have found that former enclosures were frequently changed and the plan layout of their ditches indicates there were two or more periods of Roman activity present. The latest period of occupation, probably in the 3rd–4th centuries AD, had a regular arrangement of tightly grouped small rectangular enclosures overlying an earlier, more widely spaced arrangement – possibly with a building somewhere thereabouts.
Digging is currently focused on outlying boundary ditches over roughly a hectare of low density archaeology, allowing us to prepare a storage area for topsoil to be stripped from the remaining 2.5 hectares – so much more will be found week by week as we expand our investigation.
Finds so far are from concentrations clearly visible at the edge of the denser area of features that we’ll be moving into over the coming weeks. These finds include animal bone (as you can see in one of the photos) that we think may be from butchery or domestic kitchen waste. We’ve begun to recover dispersed stray pottery sherds (fragments of ceramics), with occasional oxidised 2nd century finds present in earlier ditches and some examples of Lower Nene Valley colour-coated wares, produced near Caster, dating the latest deposits.
Some metal finds have begun to come up, including two coins – one of which is a Barbarous Radiate of the mid-3rd century AD. And, a few days ago, we also dug up our first piece of blue-green vessel glass, which suggests the fill of these ditches was either close to where these people lived or might be from midden waste.
All in all, a great beginning to our work! We can’t wait to bring you more next week.
Learn more about the site and our hopes for this excavation on the project page here.
Previous update.
Next update (week 2).