The 2014 Excavation Season is here!

Goodness me, it has been a busy three days! We have arrived on site and have been busily removing turf and beginning to set out how we are going to work on the archaeology that we are already uncovering. This site is so rich in standing remains and there are thousands of bricks just inches under the surface. Tudor bricks everywhere!

We’ve based the location of our first trench on our geophysical results from the survey carried out by students and headed up by Dom Barker, Tim Sly and Kris Strutt of the University of Southampton. Dom is on site with us this year, and has been talking the students who are doing their compulsory summer fieldwork dig through the ways that we can use magnetometry data to plan trench locations.

Two of the students who are digging this year are planning a blog post that will be published later in the week that will summarise the week’s findings, but for now we wanted to give you an idea of the kinds of research questions that we will be asking this year as we dig in the New House.

Research Aims

1. To gain a better understanding of the form and arrangement of the New House and to think about different phases of building.

2. To consider the appearance of the house within the landscape.

3. To connect plans from the early excavations to the archaeology and see how accurate the original plans were

4. To better understand how the New House was destroyed and whether there were multiple stages to this process.

We’ll write a fuller description of each of these questions over the next few days so that you can follow along as we find evidence for our working ideas.

Next week we are going to be creating some 3D models of the trench so far so that we have a record of the first phase of our digging. So we will share these with you as we make them.

What an exciting season we have ahead of us!