Welcome

Welcome to season 8 at Saveock Water Archaeology! The picture (right) is from some Stone Age fishing research I have been doing in Eastern Europe since the end of last season. We were using birch bark flares lit from a fire in the log boat in order to lure fish up to the surface, so we could harpoon them. As I give an illustrated lecture for my students during each dig week I thought you might like to know what some of the content will be about, Stone Age Fishing! Last season was good on site and we opened up two new areas one featuring the outline of a round house. We also excavated more feather pits and partly excavated one of the biggest feather pits to date which appeared to have black feathers in it. However, the weather set in to be too wet to continue excavating it so we are saving that one for Season 8! Last season we had as well as our usual university students quite a lot of people coming for a dig holiday. Something a bit more exciting that just sitting on a beach they all thought. Absolutely no experience is necessary as we teach you from scratch how to excavate correctly. We are starting Season 8 on Sunday the 30^th March and we will carry on till the end of August as usual. It is essential though if you want a specific week that you book well in advance sending the filled in booking from this site with a cheque made out to D. Wood. We plan to open up areas where we have found a lot of Mesolithic flint in the past during the beginning of April, so if that period interests you get in touch. I look forward to meeting you all in 2008.

Jacqui Wood

(Director)

 

For those of you new to the site for the first time here is a brief synopsis of the earlier phase of the excavation in this sheltered river valley in Mid Cornwall. The site covers a period from the Mesolithic to 17th century Pagan Swan feather pits (more information about these can be found by clicking on the link in the Feather Pits section on the right of this page). The main site is over a south facing peat bank on the bend of a river that used to be between two shallow lakes. This entire site has been purposely covered with various different coloured clays in an attempt to make the river bank a suitable place for dwellings. In area A/2 the first phase of the site, is what we believe to be a Mesolithic dwelling platform covered with dense green clay surrounded by stony yellow clay in which the stakes to support the dwelling were driven. The next phase we believe (and the jury is still out on this) is the use of the constant spring line to make some sort of Neolithic ritual area. We say ritual because we cannot think of any conceivable reason why people would make stone lined drains covered with 30cm of green admix clay. Then manufacture a large rectangular pool lined with white quartz cores, unless it was for some ritual purpose. In season five (2005) we found another rectangular pool next to the original.

 

These features are at present unique in Cornish or from what we have researched British archaeology. The only similar feature we have found is the Neolithic clay platform that is underneath the Maes howe monument on Orkney. A trench put into this platform revealed a stone lined drain almost identical to ours.

 

If you want to experience the dig yourself look at our Education dropdown and look at the field school. We are taking bookings for the 2008 season, which starts at the end of March and finishes at the end of August.  There is a tour of our facilities page, so you can see we are not a porta cabin in a muddy field. We are a well equipped research excavation that believes archaeology should be available to anyone who wants to learn how to dig.