Groundwell Ridge Dig Diary by Chris Walker

Saturday 19th June – Week 2 Day 4 [Day 9]

From the Swindon Evening Advertiser :- date published: Saturday 19th June 2004

A wealth of history is found just six inches underground

ROMAN coins and blue glass beads have been found among the remains of buildings at the Groundwell Ridge historic site. Just over a week after the team from English Heritage moved to the Roman site archaeologists have already uncovered the extensive walls of a Roman building. All the finds have been found just six inches beneath the surface. Dr Pete Wilson, project manager at the site, said: “We have found a large expanse of previously unknown walls of what is clearly a very complex Roman building. We have found examples of items found in domestic Roman life blue glass beads and around 15 to 20 Roman coins dating from the third and fourth century.” The experts have also uncovered a wealth of building materials and pieces of pottery, while metal detectors have been used to sift through spoil heaps to make sure no finds have been missed. The fine weather Swindon is currently experiencing has proved to be a mixed blessing. Although ideal as it allows working the open air, the hot sun can dry out the layers of soil which have preserved remains for hundreds of years. Dr Wilson said: “The hot sun can turn the soil to almost like concrete. Ideally what we are looking for is a mix of warm days then gentle rain, but we will never get it perfect.” The excavations started on June 9 and will be the most extensive ever carried out at the site.

The dig is expected to last seven weeks during which time volunteers will have the chance to team up with professional archaeologists and work on the site.

Much of the same today, conditions cooler, two light showers, ideal.

Lots of scratching of heads

Dave Hunter, site manager, has taken loads of photos

Tower
David Hunter photographing site

EH’s “latest” update – Week 2 Day 4

In Trench 6 cleaning of the area of the new room or building and the area around continued and, if anything, the site began to look even more complicated than we had thought it to be. A wall running north-south from the ‘new room’ suggests that it if it not part of a remodelling of Building 2 we actually do have another building overlying the one found in 1996/7. Looking at the trench from our photographic tower has proved rather daunting – we keep seeing new features and what we thought was going to be a relatively straight-forward, if interesting and important piece of archaeology, gets more challenging by the moment!

In Trench 7 we started to excavate the soil of the hill-wash that occupies the northern part of the trench, as well as testing soil areas in the southern part that may obscure archaeological features, or represent part of the build-up we saw along the terrace edge at the northern end of Trench 5 last year.

Finds Bulletin 2 Finds this week have included Roman building material and pottery. Building 2 may have collapsed when it went out of use. As a result we are excavating through the remains of roofs and walls and finding many fragments of Roman roof tiles. These come in two types; flat Tegula with upturned edges and curved Imbrex which covered the edges between two Tegulae. We have also found stone roof tile, some of which were made from the local Coral Ragstone. One of the rooms of the building has unpainted plaster surviving on three of the walls. There have also been a number of loose plaster fragments and some of these were painted either red or black.

Smaller finds have included a few fragments of glass, probably from a window pane, and some blue glass beads. These were tubular in shape with the remains of copper alloy wire running through the middle. They probably formed part of a bracelet or necklace.

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