Field walk 17 th October 2015; East Bergholt Site context East Bergholt, with its light, sandy soils and position on the high ground of the Stour Valley, has been good farming country for millennia. This map, the British Geological Survey of 1822 zoomed in on East Bergholt, shows the Stour as a natural highway along the bottom, and the sand and gravel soils of the high land in pink. The field surveyed is within that sandy soil area, a little to the east of the brick clay outcrop shown in yellow just above the words “East Bergholt” – its placement on a modern map is shown below. At the bottom of the field, following the direction of the arrow, is a ditch with a permanent spring, following the line of the paleo river still just visible in the field beyond the hedge line. The field slopes gently up towards the top, with several platforms.
Transcript
Field walk 17th October 2015; East Bergholt
Site context
East Bergholt, with its light, sandy soils and position on the high ground of the Stour Valley, has been good farming country for millennia. This map, the British Geological Survey of 1822 zoomed in on East Bergholt, shows the Stour as a natural highway along the bottom, and the sand and gravel soils of the high land in pink.
The field surveyed is within that sandy soil area, a little to the east of the brick clay outcrop shown in yellow just above the words “East Bergholt” – its placement on a modern map is shown below. At the bottom of the field, following the direction of the arrow, is a ditch with a permanent spring, following the line of the paleo river still just visible in the field beyond the hedge line. The field slopes gently up towards the top, with several platforms.
The A12, possibly still following the route of the Roman Pye Street, runs along the top of the field. Metal detecting
evidence has shown continuous land use from very early to the present day. Large quantities of Bronze Age and Neolithic worked flint and some pottery, plus evidence of late Bronze Age metal working, have been found further to the east and south of this area. With the fields immediately to the south now threatened with development, it was felt that a field walk would provide useful data
on the presence of any habitation in the field surveyed, and might suggest the extent of prehistoric activity in the area.
Participants / briefing
About 40 people, from East Bergholt and the surrounding villages, attended a briefing session on the morning of the field walk. The site context was discussed, and finds from the area were passed around, including Neolithic and Bronze Age flint tools, Samian ware, tesserae, and burnt flint. I also gave a talk on the identification of flint debitage and tools, and people intending to go on the walk were encouraged to handle both knapped flint and natural or plough-struck lookalikes.
31 people went from the talk to the fieldwalk. They were asked to pick up anything manmade.
Fieldwalk methodologyThe methodology used was that developed by the Cambridge Archaeology Field Group. http://www.cafg.net/docs/articles/What_is_fieldwalking.pdf
The field had been ploughed and harrowed, with no distinct plough lines, and so walkers were asked to create their own transect lines. The team was split into 24 units, evenly spread from the hedge line at the start of the field to an oak tree providing a clear measuring point at the far point of the field walk. (No further exploration was made, as the landowner had requested as little disturbance as possible to his game birds.)
The walkers were then asked to create a transect line by fixing on a point on the horizon, and walking 30 large strides towards it; the line was then dressed to ensure roughly 30m transects, and to maintain an even distribution of people. They then returned along this initial segment of a transect to pick up a collection bag, and then slowly walked back up it, bagging all finds. At the top of the segment, the bag was tied and left for collection, whilst the process was repeated for the next 30m segment of transect.
In all, 5 segments were walked, to the end of a historic field boundary.
Processing / categorisationThe categorisation suggested by the protocol was followed, namely;
Ceramics
building materials (such as bricks, tiles and tesserae) pottery of all types, including clay smoking pipe fragments.
Lithics
lithics - cores or debitage (waste) and burnt flint. flint tools.
Shells out of their context (i.e. sea oysters, mussels etc found miles from the sea)
Glass and metal were collected – the participants were asked to collect anything man-made – but all finds were modern and were discarded, along with shotgun cartridges, plastic, etc.
An initial sort was carried out after the field walk to weed out anything neither man-made nor covered above. It was clear that even though few people had done this activity before, they were making intelligent choices – even though fairly large quantities of plough-struck or frost fractured flints were discarded, there was an obvious recognition of what a striking platform or a bulb of percussion looked like, or what would make a good flake to turn into a casual tool.
The residual finds were brushed free of mud, categorised, and plotted on the table below.
Results
Map N
S
ConclusionAs expected, most activity is taking place along the boundary of the paleo river. This is particularly striking for flint tools (all scrapers), where there appears to be a cluster of habitation to the bottom left, and another towards the top right, of the map. (Chance finds of scrapers whilst metal detecting confirm that hypothesis, with several more scrapers found along the track, and another cluster on the far eastern edge of the field. See PAS records for the field and Appendix for details.)
There is also an apparent cluster of tile to the north of column X on the map, with a more random scatter elsewhere.
The number of flint tools – 22 in this exercise, with as many more from chance finds whilst metal detecting – strongly supports the hypothesis that this area was rich in prehistoric activity, and is indicative of a settlement, as well as an ancient pathway. The presence of a Langdale Vl type axe (see PAS record for the Moores Lane field) on the development side of the paleo river further supports this, and takes the timescale back through the Neolithic.
I would like to thank everyone who took part in this exercise, including Old Hall for their hospitality; all those who came on the walk; the people who helped me tabulate the results; the landowner; and the tenant, whose crop is now safely in!
Nicola Moxey
23/10/2015.
Appendix 1 – Flint tool finds outside of the field walking exerciseThe following map shows the distribution of flint tools found by the author from June 2015, either whilst walking the field margins and tramlines (the field had a crop of broad beans, allowing rather poor ground visibility), or whilst metal detecting. Again, there are clusters of tools, strongly suggestive of a settlement site. The first batch of these finds are at the time of writing (27 th Oct 2015) being lodged with the PAS, and the others will be presented shortly.
