Binchester 2015: Day 2

Despite the horrendous weather overnight, it was a fine day on site today, as we were joined by our volunteer excavators. Many of them have been with us since we first started at Binchester in 2009. In total we had nearly 90 people on site today, which means that work went ahead full steam.

In Trench 1, we continued with yesterday's plans- still trying to link all the features along the northern edge of the trench. We also started removing the interior of the corner tower- this has yet to produce any floor levels, although we live in hope. In the barrack, we've continued with the removal and cleaning of surfaces. We've also already begun the process of breaking the students into the joys of planning, as we started the planning of several parts of the later phase of the roadside gulley to the east and north of the trench, so we can start dismantling it.

In Trench 2, our poking around in the floor of the bath-house changing room has inevitably made things more complicated. The footings of the side wall of the plunge bath that was removed are now clearly visible, and the arrangement of the opus signinum is more complex than we expected, indicating some possible sub-divisions? We've also got a nice patch of concrete? with a possible construction cut for the bath side wall. There are also other undefined patches and areas of discolouration which require more fiddling with to clarify. To the west of the bath-house we have two teams clearing the layers associated with a possible path/road that runs north-south between the bath and the nicely built wall that seperates it from the strip buildings. We have a couple of roadside gullies and also removed some possible collapse tumble along the external edge of the bath wall.

To the south of the bath, we've been clearing the areas beneath where the two late buildings had previously stood, and will try and bring this area down to as low a level as possible over the forthcoming weeks. We also continued the removal of some of the road surfaces in the adjacent area.

More nice finds, several beads (from both trenches), more coins, a nice copper ring and pleasingly what appears to be a flattened gold ring, which will need to be reported as treasure.

Binchester 2015: Day One

 Back on site today for our final season. We started with seventy of our students - our volunteers join us tomorrow. The first part of the first day is always chaotic - we have to site inductions, sort out the fencing, introduce the workers to their tools and do some general site housekeeping. However, by mid-morning, we were working solidly.

In Trench 1, the focus has been on two key areas. First, we are looking at the areas running along the northern edge of the trench, including the exterior of the corner  tower and the latrine. Currently, these have not been keyed in with each other, so we are trying to come down to a common level across this area so we can tie our stratigraphy in more clearly. We've also attempted to clear up the remaining layers of soil that lay to the south of our northern rampart. The new team did great work, moving lots of soil, and exposing more surfaces. Meanwhile, we are also trying to clean up the interior floor levels of the barrack. These were left at varying heights at the end of last season. Today, we had small groups in each compartment exposing the cobble surfaces consistently across the building.

In Trench 2, we only had limited work going on inside the bath-house. Given the fact that we only have seven more weeks to go, we've decided that we are more or less happy with the state the structure has reached and are going to limit are work on its interior. The exception today was the removal of a row of the floor slabs along the east side of the main room, just to give us a quick view of the underlying deposits. This has not revealed much beyond exposing in a bit more detail the nitty gritty of the plunge-bath construction. Just at the end of the day we also started a little small-scale furtling just to better understand the constructional sequence of the external steps up to the porch. In the corridor, we had a small group of second years doing a little bit of environmental work- cleaning up and drawing a section and doing sampling for magnetic susceptibility which will help us characterise the nature of the interior fill deposits of the bath-house.

Most activity is focusing on the areas to the south and west of the bath-house, where we want to focus on better understanding the growth of the street layers and external deposits that encase the bath building. These so far have revealed new surfaces, as well as revealing more of the boundary wall of the bath compound.

Plenty of nice finds- highlight include a nice Rhineland lava millstone, a beautiful jet ring and a nice copper alloy spoon, as well as all the usual pot and bone.

Excavation begins....

Just a reminder the beginning of the excavation is imminent.

Durham University students start on site on Monday June 1st and the community volunteers will commence on Tuesday June 2nd.

Don't forget to follow progress on this blog - we are also on Twitter @Romanbinchester and Faceook www.facebook.com/romanbinchester

Exciting new dating evidence from Binchester

Today we got the results from a series of samples submitted to SUERC for C14 dating. These have provided us with some exciting new information and provided some food for thought.

Before I talk a little about the results, it is perhaps worth exploring why we decided to get some radiocarbon dates. Traditionally, Roman archaeological sites are dated using a combination of ceramic chronologies and numismatics. Combined, these can indeed provide relatively tight dating for most periods of Roman occupation in Britain. However, one of the key features about Binchester is that there is clear potential for sub-/post-Roman occupation. Activity from the 5^th century is extremely difficult to date- coins are absent after the early 5^th century, and whilst in some parts of the country the use of ceramics does continue to a greater or lesser extent into the 400s, there is very little evidence for significant use of pottery in the North beyond the end of Roman control and there is certainly no clearly defined chronology for it. There is also a general decrease in the quantity of other dateable material culture (personal objects; tools etc) compared with the say the 3^rd or 4^th centuries AD. As a consequence, unlike Roman period archaeology, early post-Roman layers are very hard to recognise on the basis of artefactual data. To make matters even more complicated in many cases, these early post-Roman layers incorporate lots of earlier, Roman material within them. In practice, this means that they often contain plenty of Roman objects, but no post-Roman objects. Not surprisingly, this means that identifying these post-Roman layers can be tricky in the extreme. One could liken it to trying to look at a lighted match held up in front of the sun – the faint traces of the flame from the former to all intents and purposes masked by the sheer power of the sunlight.

This is why we have chosen to carry out a selective programme of C14 dating on features that had the potential to begin or at least continue into the 5^th century. In Trench 1, we took samples from the large waterhole (aka Hilly’s Pit) and from a stone lined pit / working hollow within the barrack block. I won’t give all the dates right now- but the waterhole produced two second /third century AD dates- we’ve already had a similar date from the same feature along with a slightly later date belonging to the 4^th century.  At this stage, it looks like this was a long-lived feature (given its size, this is not surprising). It probably originated in the 2^nd or 3^rd century AD but carried on being used into the 4^th century AD. Combined with the artefactual evidence this is useful, as not only does it help refine the dating for the waterhole itself, but also to the nearby barrack. This is because the earliest phase of the stone- built barrack was partly cut by later phases of the waterhole. A better sense of the chronology of the waterhole will give us a clearer sense of when this first phase ended and the building contracted in size.

The dates from the stone-lined feature within the barrack are very exciting. There are both of mid/late 5^th-6^th century AD date. These are clearly and unequivocally of post-Roman date. We need to go back and look at some of the associated sequences. I do remember though that seemingly associated with this feature was a ridge of crude cobbled pavement running across the interior of the building from a wall in the north gable end. If these features are all contemporary it suggests that this northern part of the barrack at least was still standing. One job for us now is to go back and look at the associated artefactual assemblage from the pit fill. Is there anything that might be post-Roman or is it all residual? I do remember that amongst this material was a fragment of sawn antler tine. Antler working was also a feature of the ultimate/sub  Roman layers identified during the excavations within the praetorium, although our C14 dates are noticeably later than these features. They could plausibly even be contemporary with the early Anglo-Saxon burials that formed the last phase of early activity in the praetorium complex.  A compelling question for us now, is whether any of the animal bone dumps and spreads that lapped up around the edge of the barrack block is of the same date. Certainly, superficially, the bone-rich fill of the pit looks very similar. If the other bone is of a similarly late date, then we have a major assemblage of early medieval cattle bone with a huge research potential.

In Trench 2 our samples were all drawn from the massive dump deposits that filled in the interior of the bath-house. Here our major question is whether all this material was thrown into the building over a very short period or whether it was the result of a protracted period of dumping (over years? decades?).  The dates we have back so far are all 3^rd-4^th century AD – this is not unexpected, but perhaps a little earlier than I was expecting. We know that amongst the ceramic assemblage from these dump layers are fragments of the distinctive Crambeck Parchment Ware (CPW). This is a very late Roman pottery type, seemingly only produced from the AD370s. One job we need to do is to go back and look at the ceramic s assemblage and work out whether the CPW is found in all the layers, including those which provided dating samples. There is still clearly more work to be done to understand this sequence and unpick the slight disparity between the C14 dates and the ceramic dates.

These are just my first thoughts about the new dates- we will try and do some more analysis in the coming weeks, and we hope to try and Bayesian modelling of the dates to refine our understanding of this new data. I’ll share our thoughts on this on the blog as usual.

Looking forward to Season Seven...

It is just over two weeks until we start on our seventh, and final, season of excavation at Roman Binchester. We'll be working, Monday to Friday, from June 1st until July 17th. The excavation team will include Durham University students, members of the local community and many others. Among our priorities will improving our understanding of the bath-house, as well as tying up the loose ends in the barracks trench. Every year though we have new discoveries and surprises, so its impossible to predict what the big story will be. Keep track of the proejct on our blog or by following us on twitter  @RomanBinchester

Daily blog updates begin June 1st.

Binchester - Digging for Britain

Welcome to anyone who has found their way to our blog after seeing the site on Digging for Britain. As you will have seen from the television, we had a spectacular year at Binchester and have uncovered fantastic remains from the Roman fort and civilian settlement.

As with many large-scale research excavations we are not in the field over the winter. However, we are already making plans for our final season's work at the site this summer. We'll be back out on site at the beginning of June, when we'll be updating our blog everyday, and continuing our first baby steps with video diaries.

Happy Christmas from Binchester

 

Happy Christmas from all of us at the Binchester project. We have had a fantastic year in 2014. In the field our highlights have included revealing more of the incredibly well-preserved Roman bath-house and its associated remains. We now have on of the best surviving Roman buildings from the Northern frontier. We also had wonderful finds, including an extremely exciting early Christian ring, which is  rare example of evidence of early Christianity from Northern England. Plans are well underway for our final season of excavation in the summer of 2015.

 

I'd also like to extend a special thanks to all those who signed our petition earlier this year to help secure the future of the site. We were overwhelmed with the support we received from across the world. Your enthusiasm did the job, and the site was sold to the Auckland Castle Trust. This will help ensure the site has a long-term future, and we look forward to working with the Trust on their future plans for Vinovia.

David