Our first fieldwork days are done! Thank you very much to everyone that came along to the open fieldwalking day on Sunday, as you can see from the photos we had a great turn out of both adults and younger archaeologists.
The fieldwalking took place in the field close to Helensfield nature area, between New Lane and Red Lane:
This field was chosen as it is the route the Roman Road takes from Skipbridge and up through Green Hammerton. The aim of the fieldwalk was to see if what we could find on the surface of the field, and the distribution of finds across the site.
We had great support and training from Jon Kenny, community archaeologist, who took us through the training and how to do the field walk on the Saturday. Jon helped us out with lending us some of his gear as well as a nice tray of finds to show to people as examples. Once Jon had shown us how to start on the work, we got underway, measuring and gridding out the field into 10mx10m squares. GHAS committee member Rachel was leading the work and directing us on how and what to pick up and record.
Over the two days, with lots of fieldwalking, bagging, labelling, measuring and cane moving, we managed to cover 200mx50m strip along the field edge closest to Helensfield. That’s 10000 square meters of field done! As part of the work, we got GPS coordinates for a number of points on our grid so that if the opportunity arises in the future we can pick up again from where we left off. 10000m2 sounds like a lot of field, but really it’s not even quarter of the total.
What did we find? Looking at the bags we gathered, a lot of stuff! As you’d expect there was much modern material such as tiles, bricks, ceramics and so on, but also some more interesting stuff like clay pipes and even a china doll’s hand and foot. Going further back in time, a number of pieces of medieval pottery, and a possible piece of Roman pottery (TBC). Even older were a couple of what looks like flint cutting blades, possibly dating to the Neolithic.
Next Steps
Now we have the finds, it will be a case of getting everything cleaned up, dried, catalogued and analyzed which as you can imagine will take some time to do. Watch this space for details on how you can get involved in the future.
THANK YOU!
Big thanks for the help go to:
Jon Kenny, Community Archaeologist
Thorp Trees – For their kind donation of 200 canes, and we did need all of them
Angie Taylor for allowing us field access
The Council for British Archaeology Yorkshire for helping us with a grant to fund the work
…and all the volunteers from the community who came along to help out with the work.
