The project was undertaken by a small core team of between three and four full-time staff, with the assistance of a large number of volunteers and site assistants excavating on a seasonal basis. The bulk of the work was undertaken in the summer months when volunteers were available. The cost of undertaking the project with a full-time team would have been at least double that of the actual cost, and a tremendous debt is owed to the huge workforce, particularly the many staff who worked seven days a wee k during the summer months in order to complete what turned out to be a much larger project than had originally been anticipated. The project was amongst the last of the large volunteer-supported excavations in which the volunteers benefited in the form o f fieldwork training and the project benefited from reduced labour costs.
Each area was stripped using heavy plant, a Box-Scraper for areas 2CA-2CC and subsequently, in areas where the use of the box scraper would have proved too damaging to the archaeological deposits, a Hy-Mac. Following the removal of the ploughsoil, whic h varied in thickness from 0.1-0.35m, the surface was cleaned by shovel scraping or trowelling and brushing, depending on the nature of the subsoil, area by area. In some areas the Hy-Mac was re-employed to remove further deposits and to clarify the featu res.
A small degree of truncation may have resulted from this action, but no more than c.0.05m. In parts of Area 11AA, 11AC and 11AE, a mechanical brush was employed but its application was found to be suitable only in areas of severely plough-damage d solid bedrock and could not be employed elsewhere.
The large field teams of up to 75 people made it possible to clean extensive areas of the site at a time, enabling sampling strategies to be developed and key areas to be quickly identified when cleaning was complete. Without this approach it would not have been possible to establish the overview that is such an important feature of our understanding of this site. As each major area was uncovered we began to identify the tremendous differences in land-use and function of the various zones of the settle ment. The immense benefits of seeing the settlement unfold spatially will influence much of the analytical programme, where the spaces between structures and zones of activity will be as important as the structures themselves. Each season brought not only a completely different excavating environment on account of the differing subsoils, but also the discovery that the differences between each area were generally greater than the similarities, such that any pre-determined work plan held at the beginning o f the season had to be radically changed to ensure that the unique nature of each area could be effectively examined and recorded.
In each area examined large areas were cleaned before excavation began. For much of the site this could be rapidly achieved through shovel scraping. On the frost-shattered chalk outcrops, however, careful trowelling and brushing of the surface was nece ssary to enable the features to be isolated. In contrast to the soft chalks so familiar from Wessex, the Wolds chalk is both hard and frost-shattered at the surface which, combined with the effects of both medieval and more recent ploughing, make a partic ularly difficult working environment. The cleaning process had to be thorough the first time or it was almost impossible to isolate the post-holes, which were frequently truncated and often represented a few features in a landscape of solution holes and p eriglacial features.
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URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue5/westhes/2-6-5.htm
Last updated: Tue Dec 15 1998