Backgarden Archaeology

By Mike & Kate Pratt

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The Digging Continues …..

We had caught the bug! We had no problem knowing where to sink our second test pit. We needed a soak-away at the end of a range of outbuildings and a few years previously, just in the right spot, we had found a large flat stone under the soil surface. Thinking there could be remains of a structure we felt compelled to investigate further.

Nothing out of the ordinary was found until we were about 40cms down when a type of pottery started to emerge that hadn’t been noticed in the first test pit. We weren’t hopeful of finding much of it, however, as we expected to hit the natural subsoil at 50cms based on our previous, admittedly limited, experience.

A Bottomless Pit!

We were in for a surprise. We kept on going through layer after layer, finding more and more of the same pottery, plus animal bones and many once-smooth but now cracked stones. Eventually we had to stop at Layer 10, one metre down, with no sign of the bottom. One metre square test pits are not meant to be taken so deep for fear of the sides collapsing on the hapless excavator. We stopped – but only after digging out a quarter of the bottom down to 1.2 metres still with no sign of an end!

Apart from the finds recovered from the feature it had been possible to expose a section of sloping side where softer soil was trowelled away from a more compact surface.

Pit, Ditch or Hollow?

It was a complete surprise after the first test pit. Was the feature we had revealed part of a pit or part of a more extensive ditch? It was tempting to think the former as it happened to be beside the site of the earth closet that existed during the early 1900s. Perhaps a previous generation had placed an earlier privy up the garden out of the way of where they lived!

Alternatively it could be part of a ditch that ran along the existing boundary with next door. Perhaps it was part of an extensive hollow used for some practical agricultural or domestic purpose. With the summer season of 2003 drawing to a close it was obvious that more digging was necessary but it would have to be delayed until 2004 so we filled in the first pit and left the second one open waiting for the next season’s digging.

Local Coarse Ware!

While excavating Test Pit 2 we continued to take the pottery sherds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) sessions in York for identification as they emerged from the ground. Immediately we started to hit problems. The copious examples of one particular type of pottery were quickly labelled “local coarse ware” meaning “difficult to date”. Finer pottery that occurs over wider areas nationally, even internationally, has been seen and documented by more archaeologists and is therefore easier to date.

We received a wide range of dating assessments and we were told that it would help if more rim and base pieces were found as they can be identified more easily. Miraculously, once mentioned they started to appear from the pit but the dating situation did not improve immediately. We looked for every opportunity to show it to archaeologists until we had obtained six assessments: 3 said medieval – 11th Century onwards; 1 said post Roman – 5th or 6th Century; 1 said late Roman.

In defence of the “experts” consulted, although they were all professional archaeologists, not all archaeologists can be expected to be pottery experts and some pottery experts specialise in some areas and not in others.

On the basis of a comparison with the sherds found in the first pit, some of which had been identified as circa 11th Century, we thought that this very different coarse ware was older than that. Therefore the medieval dating seemed inappropriate.

We were coming to accept that it was a matter of seeking a consensus of opinion as we consulted more and more experts and that we might never obtain a definite date.

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