Join Us for a Year of Fantastic Finds!

As we relax into the holidays and fieldwork has wound down for a couple of weeks, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank our team and clients for their incredible hard work and dedication over the last year. It’s been an exciting and productive twelve months, and we’re delighted to have so many wonderful people working with us in the pursuit of fantastic archaeology.

Exactly how fantastic has the archaeology been, you might ask? Well, to celebrate the festive season, we wanted to show off some of the team’s favourite finds of 2025!

A stone axe hammer

Quarries were the gift that kept giving this year, with stand-out finds also coming from Leyburn Quarry in North Yorkshire. There’s no doubt that one of the stars of the show is the stone axe hammer, which maybe you recognise from our BBC article! The axe hammer is in perfect condition, indicating this isn’t just any old tool but a status symbol. It was also not made from native rock, but instead likely derives from a stone source in Scotland!

Elsewhere, thanks to a committed fieldwalking approach early on at a Peak District site, we found over 350 flint implements, dating from the Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age. This impressive assemblage includes a wide range of blades, scrapers, piercers, knives, and arrowheads. The distribution of the flints was particularly interesting at this site, demonstrating that specialised production was undertaken on the site, by different groups, at different times!

The photos below show some tremendous barbed and tanged arrowheads, cutting blades and thumbnail scrapers.

There was no shortage of great archaeology from another site in Yorkshire. Here we uncovered a circular palisaded enclosure, roundhouse, refuse pits and burials, producing a fantastic assemblage of finds. This included Late Upper Palaeolithic flints,  corded Beaker pottery, a bone spindle whorl and an almost complete saddle quern!

What’s particularly great about this site is the glimpse into the early periods, with most of the finds dated to the Bronze and Iron Ages. We also got a lovely look into aspects of daily life, such as with the saddle quern—a stone tool traditionally used for hand-grinding grain into flour—which was used until no longer functional, before being intentionally broken and deposited in a pit.

Finally, and moving closer to the modern day, we have a site within a redevelopment in Greater Manchester. Excavations here produced a wonderful collection of artefacts dating mostly to the 19^th and 20th centuries. These included: a clay pipe with thistle decoration on both sides, which was likely produced by a local pipe maker (such as Edward Pollock); ceramic fuses produced by MEM Kantark in Birmingham in the early 20th century; and a drinks bottle embossed with “FLETCHER & HOLT” and “REGISTERED TRADE MARK MANCHESTER“ and a man making bottles.

If you’re in Manchester, check out Joseph Holt’s brewery which is still brewing and supplying beer to over 500 pubs! You can also read more about Manchester’s fascinating industrial past through the lens of ARS projects here.

We have a wealth of projects happening in 2026, so rest assured we’ll be bringing you more astonishing artefacts in the months ahead. Until then, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy New Year!