Trial trenching in fields at Frensham Manor in 2001 located a Roman occupation site which survives below plough soil level and would appear to represent the remains of a small farmstead dating from the late 1st to the 3rd centuries AD. Finds of redeposited fragments of highly fired clay flooring point to the presence of a kiln in the immediate vicinity and metal detector finds from adjacent fields are indicative of further Roman activity in the area.
'Revolutionary' Ideas: Seeing society in the ceramic technology of the Later Iron Age of Berkshire and Hampshire
Emma Corke, site director of the field excavations at Cocks Farm, Abinger will be talking to us about the latest season of excavation . Magnetometry carried out by the Roman Studies Group showed a mass of features on the hill above the Roman villa site, and excavation has revealed both prehistoric and Roman activity.
Members of RSG will be reporting back both on post-excavtion work relating to Ashtead Roman villa (David Bird), Flexford (David Calow) and Church Meadow Roman settlement site (Nikki Cowlard), and recent fieldwork led by David and Audrey Graham.
Alexis Haslam is a Senior Archaeologist with Pre-Construct Archaeology and has extensive experience of running commercial archaeological sites in London and the South-East. In 2015 he led the investigations on the animal husbandry site at NESCOT in Ewell, which revealed a landscape of Roman chalk quarrying with extensive ritual deposition. Alexis will be taking us behind the scenes of Roman-period commercial excavations in the Historic County of Surrey, including those in Borough High Street in Southwark.
David Staveley is well known to many of us in RSG. He is a computer programmer by day and in his spare time is an archaeological geophysicist studying Roman roads and roadside settlements in Sussex. David has carried out ground penetrating radar at Flexford and has used GPR to identify Stane Street beneath Church Street in Ewell (in conjunction with the Church Meadow Project). He is also the author of Snuffler, freeware geophysics software for earth resistance and magnetometry.
This meeting starts our winter series of lectures which run from October 2016 to March 2017. The dates for these lectures are as follows: 11th October, 8th November, 6th December, 3rd January, 7th February and 7th March.
Please note that the October and November meetings are taking place on the 2nd Tuesday of the month rather than the usual 1st Tuesday.
VISIT TO FISHBOURNE ROMAN PALACE ON 23 JULY
CHEDWORTH ROMAN VILLA ON 1 OCTOBER
