| The Roman dig in my back garden! By Harriet, February & March 2006 |
Day 1 |
Before
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After
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Steve from Witan Archaeology came to dig our back garden on Sunday 27th February 2006. We found lots of roman finds like pots and bowls and lots of slate roof tiles. We are hoping to find some more finds or a roman building of some sort. Our finds tray looked like this:
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We found a piece of pot still in the ground and it looked like this
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And when we dug it up it looked like this
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We found some burnt patches of soil and we are hoping that it was caused by the burning of a roman kiln or a destroyed building. We can see some pieces of tile or pot or mortar in that burnt patch.
The diggers extended the area and found more burnt areas.
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This is trench 2 on day one
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This is trench 2 on day two
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Our next door neighbour, Stuart, he found quite a lot in his garden, for example look at this:
 
It’s the same piece of pottery at different sides.
It’s a late 3rd century white glazed mortaria – a wide shallow food dish.
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The Witan Archaeologists are: Steve, Stefan and Paul. The one in the blue coat crouching down is Stefan. The one with the grey camouflage coat on is Steve. And the one with a green fleece on is Paul.
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Day 2 |
We found quite a lot of glass and animals bones. These are some bits of the glass that we found
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This is a bit of a roman bone needle
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We found a jaw of a carnivorous animal and it wasn’t cut or anything, just natural
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We found a piece of a mosaic tile and it looked like this
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We found a piece of pot rim and we are hoping to find the rest of the pot
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A summary of finds on days 1 and 2 |
| Day 1 |
Pieces of glass |
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| Day 2 Early morning |
Bone needle |
Grey-ware pot rim |
Animal jaw bone |
| Day 2 Late morning |
Clay-like soil in trench 3 |
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| Day 2 Lunch time |
Piece of Roman pottery |
Piece of mosaic tile |
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Day 3 |
On day three we extended trench one, the one which started it all off, into Paddy’s garden, our next door neighbour. We found lots of grey-ware and I excavated a base and rim of a shallow dish - ‘dog-dish’.
As well as that we found a Nene Valley colour-coated beaker unfortunately it wasn’t complete but we had half of it.
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We opened another trench in Paddy’s garden (by April it was humungous and we found a 4 foot deep ditch in it, with a road surface and a shallower ditch the other side)
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This is the ditch right hand side of the picture (south side)
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We found some coins – these were sent for identification to the Heritage Services at the County Council. One is a silver Severus Alexander 228 a.d.
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We had an exhibition at Donington-le Heath
Manor House on 19th March 2006 on Roman
Day, to show the best pieces of pot, and tile
we have found. Here are some pictures
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And...we have been digging for 5 weeks, and are still not sure what we have found. Could it be a wall? a villa? or a ditch? The amount of roof tile, slate and pottery that has been found in the ditch could easily make a villa. We will carry on and see.... |
Me, sorting through a spoil heap
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Early Days
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Two men in a trench
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