Bottles, Stones & Pottery: a note from our Finds Czar Jules McHale

Some of the Greatest Hits from the Victorian midden in the St Serf's trenches

Comforted by Pringles, giant buttons and a variety of visits from our SERF team and residents of Dunning, this year’s small finds processing has been carried out at the wee school in Dunning Village. In this season's infancy, the finds recovered were predominantly from our trenches at Kirk Wynd, behind St. Serf’s church. We have amassed a plethora of bottles, clay pipes and pottery from a late 19th/early 20th century midden site.

An example of late medieval green-glazed pottery, showing the thumbprint of the potter

Throughout the season, St Serf's has produced medieval pottery sherds, while Kay Craig has produced multiperiod material from early Iron Age pottery to a possibly medieval crucible for melting precious metals.

Leadketty, with its complex and numerous features, has been sterile of any finds so far! But its sterile condition is very different from the situation in last year's henge and palisaded enclosure excavations, where numerous contexts turned up Grooved Ware ceramic and burnt deposits. This does infer that the monuments were most likely kept intentionally clean. In this case, there is important evidence for prehistoric ritual activity even in this absence of artefacts. Both rich and sterile excavation conditions provide us as archaeologists with information that can potentially shape our interpretations and understanding of the sites.

A very unusual quartz pivot stone, split in half, found in the St Serf's trenches

All of the small finds that have been recovered from the series of trenches at SERF 2013 have been washed where appropriate, catalogued and stored to enable potential further study. To date, approximately 500 finds in total have been recorded. The assemblages of artefacts vary across lengthy time periods.

Happy St Serf's Day!

Prof. Steve Driscoll slays the Dragon as Mairi invokes St Serf

Fortuitously for us in the St Serf's trenches, July the 1st is St Serf's feast day. St Serf is an obscure Pictish saint whose dossier only dates back to the 12th century but incorporates much earlier material. One of the most famous legends which have grown up around this shadowy figure is his slaying of a dragon with his staff, which is said to have occurred in Dunning. Taking the initiative, our student volunteers crafted a dragon last night, which we then flew over our trench today. At the end of another grueling day, our supervisor Prof. Steve Driscoll re-enacted the slaying of the beast, with our trusty ranging pole representing St Serf's venerated staff. Huzzah!

The Dragon flying over our trench.

Early foundations and medieval structures at St Serf's

Earlier foundations beneath the square tower of St Serf's

Amazing things are happening in the St Serf's trenches. Trench 07, a small architectural slot at the base of the 12th-century square tower, has revealed the foundations of an earlier stone structure! In the photo above, you can see the mortared rubble foundations of the 12th-century tower as it joins the nave. But about halfway down the trench, the foundations change to a setting of stones on a slightly different axis, set into a trench filled with rubble. What's more, this rubble contains flecks of disarticulated human bone, meaning it has cut into earlier burials. Whatever this all relates to, it is earlier than the 12th century, so this is where it gets exciting!

The mystery medieval stone setting in Trench 04 outside the churchyard wall

Meanwhile, outside the churchyard wall (and some 30cm beneath it) we have finally gotten through the garden soils filled with medieval ceramic (see below). At a depth of over a meter, our students' quality troweling skills have revealed numerous stone settings, including the one pictured above. This feature in particular has turned up bits of burnt bone and charcoal so far, so we may be seeing in situ settlement evidence, predating the modern extension of the churchyard ...stay tuned to find out what it is!

Medieval potsherds from Trench 04 and 05

Meanwhile, our Open Day today included brand-new 'Churchspotting: How to Read a Medieval Church' tours of St Serf's led by Dr Adrián Maldonado, which were a big hit with the locals and will hopefully run again next year. Week 3 at St Serf's is going to be a big one!

Updates from the end of Week 2

St Serf's

Trench 04 is now down to the medieval subsoil.

It took us over a week to get through the modern midden and structures in Trench 04, and we are now well into preserved, possibly medieval layers. The finds we are getting at our current level are fragments of medieval redwares, white gritty ware (12-14th century) and some later green glaze, but they are all quite abraded fragments so we are still in what are essentially garden soils. Here's hoping they are sealing earlier features!

Meanwhile, in Trenches 05 and 06, we have found out a lot about the modern history of the village, especially the impressive feats of early modern engineering that reclaimed land from the riverbank. Trench 06 extends from the churchyard wall down to the Dunning Burn and shows that most of this area is actually made ground postdating the modern embankment of the river. And all done without the help of JCBs!

The 19th-century embankment wall and our trench through the made ground reclaimed from the ancient riverbank.

Kay Craig

The massive outer wall of the structures at Kay Craig.

Excited update! The bedrock wall face we extended the trench to investigate has turned out to be a wall after all! Alex uncovered courses of faced stone under the large bedrock chunks with lovely wee chock stones packing the gaps between the wall and the bedrock face. Now we are uncovering this fully to start to investigate its relationship to the structure on the top of the hill.

Open Day this Sunday!

Don't forget to swing by Dunning for our Open Day this Sunday June 30th! See our previous post for more details.

SERF Open Day this Sunday!

Here is the line-up of events taking place on the SERF Open Day this Sunday June 30th!

• Open Day at St Paul's Church Hall, 11am-4pm: Here you will find stalls, photos and artefacts from our excavations around Dunning and Forteviot, including Roman finds from Castle Craig Broch. Learn about the ongoing Dunning Big Dig and see some of the finds from this year so far!

View Dunning Saint Pauls Church in a larger map

• Leadketty guided site tours, 12pm and 2pm: come see our ongoing excavations at the prehistoric cropmark complex near Dunning. Meet at St Paul's Church Hall, and please note there is a 20-minute walk to and from the site, which is not wheelchair-accessible.

 

• Churchspotting: how to read a medieval church: St Serf's Parish Church, 10:30am and 2pm: This guided tour led by Dr Adrian Maldonado will show you how to spot the medieval origins of a church, using the architecture and sculpture of St Serf's as an example. Tours will be roughly one and a half hours and take place in the churchyard and include a visit to our ongoing excavations outside the churchyard wall.

 

Curving wall found at Kay Craig

Iron Age? Medieval? Structures begin to emerge beneath the rubble at Kay Craig.

Today at Kay Craig we continued to expose the wall on the top of the hill, most of the inner face within the trench is exposed now and we finally discovered part of the outer face. We can now say that the structure wall is approximately 1.2m wide and curving. Sexy! The possible wall lower down the hill we were investigating with the trench extension is probably the remains of a boundary or enclosing wall that parallels the structure on the top. We will continue to excavate the probably medieval/early medieval layers tomorrow and hopefully see if anything earlier lies beneath!

In other news more early Iron Age pottery was found in the ditch as well as a substantial layer of tumbled stone from the structure.

Supervisor Cathy MacIver is excited.

Week 2 kicks off

Kay Craig

Bec: This week started out with a scary weather forecast of heavy rain that would decrease as the week went on. However we only suffered a few showers on Saturday, this has allowed us to make good progress on the excavation which in turn has allowed us to understand the site better.

Up in Trench 2 a possible burnt post has been discovered along with a drystone built structure and a possible hearth. To get a better understanding of the size and shape of the structure we have extended the trench downslope to investigate a possible outer wall face. In Trench 1 we are exploring the ditch and rampart and hopefully by the end of the week we will have a clearer idea about the period of our site and what has happened when. You can find out more by visiting the village hall in Dunning on Sunday to see our stall at the project open day.

Andrew is excited.

Stop Press! We bring you breaking news of a new find on site today. Andrew spotted a possible metal heating stand - probably used to heat precious metals. This was found in the layer of stone tumble inside the structure so hopefully we will find more evidence of this activity on site over the next few days as we remove the baulks. Here is a photo of Andrew looking excited (and one that actually shows the artefact). More hillfort news soon! :)

The possible crucible for heating precious metals. Excitement!

The Dunning Big Dig

Also kicking off tomorrow is the Big Dig II, where the SERF team will once again venture out across the village to dig test pits in back gardens across Dunning. Find out about last year's Big Dig results here, or drop by the Wee School for daily (except Friday) drop-in sessions and see what we've been finding. We will also be hosting an Open Day in the Village Hall this Sunday. Get involved!

Week 1 wrap-up

We are now a week into the SERF fieldschool 2013, which means the topsoil has been cleared off, the first features have been planned and there's lots of contexts to explore. This is where the fun part begins! But first, let's take a look at what progress has been made on each site, as told by the supervisors and students themselves.

Leadketty

Yesterday we completed our fifth full day excavating at Leadketty, and the results so far have been tantalising. As yet, we are not sure exactly how old the site we are excavating is: it could be Neolithic, or Iron Age, or even medieval. A complete sense of what is in the massive trench we are working in is also not clear because, believe it or not, the weather has been too good! The dry conditions mean that the gravel subsoil and the archaeological features are more or less all the same sort of beige colour, with only charcoal-rich features easily apparent. Yet we know there is a lot of archaeology in the trench, as for about 2 hours on Tuesday morning, just after an overnight rain fall, we saw dozens of features including several palisades and ditches, and lots of pits and possible postholes. Today we gave up planning for the time being as we simply cannot see the archaeology, and we may have to resort to spraying the site or doing a highly risky rain dance over the weekend.

Palisade trench visible on Tuesday morning for about 2 hours!

 The main objective of this trench is to investigate a cropmark enclosure, measuring about 100m and defined by a segmented or causewayed ditch. We have found the ditch in our trench, but we have also discovered a previously unknown external fence line that seems to define an even bigger enclosure, perhaps 140m or so in diameter. We have not started to excavate the boundaries of these massive concentric enclosures yet, but we have over the last few days commenced work on some of the features within the enclosure.

So far we have not had any exciting artefacts, other than a sherd of 19^th-century pottery which seems to have found its way into a large posthole! Inside the big enclosures are a series of features, including one defined by a shallow fence slot, and containing a lot of rather small postholes. Again, this could be Neolithic, or much older. Next week the objective will be to start to investigate the two enclosure boundaries and work out how old they are, and how they relate to one another. Then we can start to piece together how this fits in better with the discoveries of the SERF Project to date. All we need now is a little rain!

Tim enthusiastically bucketing

Kay Craig

As part of the hillfort excavations programme this year we are tackling Kay Craig, a low hill directly across from Castle Craig (the broch site we excavated in 2011 and 2012). The site commands great views up Strathearn and over the local area, pointing towards its strategic location. This part of the study area contains several hillforts in close proximity around Coul (meaning corner glen) including Ben Effrey, Ogil Hill and Castle Craig so we are hoping to find out when this site has been in use and whether it is contemporary with any of these other sites.
 

A tantalising piece of information was provided by the landowners and locals who have told us about an historical structure being inhabited on this site until 1695. It is not marked on any of the historic maps or in any documentary sources we have come across so far but we are keeping a close eye out for any evidence of medieval or later occupation. The discovery of pottery today which is possibly from the early Iron Age suggests we have a prehistoric element to the site as well so we may be looking at an area which has been in use over several periods. Some of our students share their experience so far:

 

Veronica: We're now on Day Five of the excavations at Kay Craig and things are progressing nicely. So far the activities have included de-turfing the trenches, trowelling off the top layers to reveal a spread of stones in the ditch and some much larger stones on the bank. These were then planned and photographed so we are now excavating in earnest! Trench 1 is 2m by 20m and cuts across the ditch and up over a large wide bank while Trench 2 is 6m by 6m and is placed across part of the platform on the top of the hill. We are a much smaller crew than the other sites but that is just fine up here, great views across to Castle Craig and great company are making this a very pleasurable experience indeed. Also, NO RAIN! Yet.... :)

 

Andrew: How best to summarise the last five days at Kay Craig? The name itself means 'Rock of the Jackdaws' and although we haven't seen any of those yet it is easy to imagine a crumbling, bird-infested tower on the hill. The discovery of plenty of tumbled rubble in Trench 2 suggests a possible structure of decent size, surrounded by a ditch and bank further downslope. An unfired clay loomweight was our first find although we have heard tales of more grisly things buried on the site...thankfully the deposited placenta (shudder) that we were told was there remains undiscovered! 

 

St Serf's

Exposing the foundations of the churchyard wall of St Serf's reveals the foundations of earlier stone structures.

The St Serf's crew have been dealing with a very different kind of archaeology than those at Leadketty or Kay Craig. Our trenches outside the churchyard of St Serf's parish church, Dunning are all into archaeological layers now after removing the overburden, which contained incredible amounts of largely Victorian pottery and glass as this area was used as the village rubbish tip until the early 20th century. Trenches 04 and 05 have revealed the foundations of the churchyard wall and earlier drystone buildings similar to those found in this area during SERF 2012. In the closing hours of Thursday, however, a single sherd of Scottish White Gritty Ware, dating to the 12-14th centuries, was found in Trench 05, so we may be getting down to medieval layers.

Carolyn and Kirk, two of our students from the US, play it safe in Trench 06

Trench 06, which extends from the churchyard to the Dunning Burn, has had the deepest deposits anywhere, so much so that our students have had to take safety precautions! The river embankment now stands to 1.5m and the infill seems to consist of made ground, reclaimed in the improvements of the modern period. There are some undisturbed deposits in the area nearest the churchyard wall, and we will be investigating these more in the following week.

Trench 07, a narrow architectural trench at the base of St Serf's medieval square tower, has finally exposed the original base course of the tower and this is set into a layer containing medieval ceramic, so we are coming close to revealing the earliest stages of the church in Dunning - stay tuned for more details!

The Wee Big Dig

Well the Big Dig's Wee Dig at Dunning Primary was a great success! The kids there were so enthusiastic and well behaved. The team opened two trenches with the help of our wee diggers. Amongst other things trench one produced our star find: a piece of brown glazed ware probably dating to the 15th century; trench 2 revealed the remains of the old path to the school's original entrance. The event ended with the burial of a time capsule filled with work by the children :)

Welcome to the 2013 SERF Fieldschool!

After our successful dig at Castle Law Forgandenny hillfort earlier this spring, the SERF fieldschool is back for the 2013 season! This year (15 June - 5 July) we have three main sites in the Dunning area of Perthshire, continuing the work we started last year. Our excavations this year cover the Neolithic straight to the modern day. Alongside that we'll be doing lots of surveys and other activities in the Dunning area; read on or follow us on Twitter for regular updates @SERFProject. Let's introduce this year's sites!

Leadketty Farm

Dene at the opening of the Leadketty trench last week.

This year's prehistoric excavation is truly massive, at 50x20m. We are investigating the site of a possibly Neolithic causewayed enclosure, seen only as a cropmark from aerial photography. The topsoil is all cleared off now and there's plenty of features appearing already, so stay tuned for more details.

St Serf's, Dunning

Our students opening one of the trenches outside St Serf's Parish Church, Dunning. 

 

We are also continuing our exploration of the medieval church of St Serf's, which is famous for its 12th-century Romanesque tower and now houses the 9th-century Dupplin Cross (originally from Forteviot). Our excavation in this area last year turned up a fragment of another Pictish cross slab reused in a post-medieval context, as well as lots of evidence for the weaving industry that made Dunning an important market town. So far this year we have been busy sorting through loads of modern midden material (see below), but with the odd fragment of 16/17th-century ceramic appearing here and there.

Just some of the many modern finds found today in Trench 04 outside St Serf's!

Kay Craig

Neil starts digging through the rubble at Kay Craig.

Our last main site is at Kay Craig, a possible hillfort directly across from the broch we discovered at Castle Craig. That site was had evidence of occupation from the Iron Age down to the 11th century, so the aim at Kay Craig is to see when this site was used and how it related to the occupation on the broch site. But there's still lots of rubble to clear off!

And much more...

Alongside our main excavations at these sites, we're also running a fantastic series of events in and around Dunning this month, including the second annual Big Dig all around the village, and the Wee Big Dig at Dunning Primary School. For more information, visit our outreach events page or follow the Big Dig on Facebook!

For more on previous seasons of SERF, including excavation reports and photo galleries, head to our project website.