Monday, 31 December 2012

Walkin in a winter wonderland

Today I encountered the amazingness that is the British countryside.
And learnt that archaeology truly is all around us.

At 2ish in the afternoon it was decided that I might go for a lovely little wander around the fields and tracks near the house. I have not previously done so due to:

1) Christmas
2) Rain
3) Being forced to spend that time drinking cups of tea

For once it was actually not pissing down, and some kind of sunlight was visable (ish) so to the fields I went.

The first thing I noticed about 500m from the house was that there were a veritable fuckton of lithics scattered across the ground.

Im not actually entireley sure what I find sadder:

a) that I was genuinley excited by this
b) that I was looking at the ground hard enough to find them in the first place

The truth is that both are pretty sad, and probably attributable to the month spent in Egypt staring at the ground day in and out looking for lithics. This is all probably part of Dr. Evils malicious plan to brainwash us into artefact slaves for the rest of our lives...

And yes. I can confirm that this brainwashing is working.

The flakes were all located at the edges of the field and looked as though they had been ploughed there over some time, a cursory walk through the fields showed that there was indeed alot of these flakes and cores in isolated pockets, with the stuff at the edges most likely being pushed there later. After some more background research it turns out that theres the main neolithic quarry for flint about 2k away, and that the raw material from this area is pretty similar, if not a direct match.

Sadly I am now genuinley intrested in lithics and as such I collected a number of examples and am going about mapping where these were found in the fields.

Just when you thought this couldnt get any worse... BAM...

On my return journey I discovered a large hole in the ground, about 50m out the back of our place which had orange pottery in the bottom and also two small pipes. The house which I live in presently is an old converted 15th through till 18th century threshing house, and the remains out the back appear to be part if a courtyard which joined the threshing house to the main cavenham house, which apparently burnt down sometime at the end of the 19th century.

So yes. Amazing to be in a place where archaeology is quite literally all around :3






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