Environmental Group
The Group
This group runs alongside the Pottery Study Group, and is lead by Kay Boreland. It studies the soils from the excavations at Chewton Mendip through flotation and dry-sieving. Meeting fortnightly and with scope for private study at home, the members are painstakingly looking at soils from various key areas of the dig, in particular the Saxon artisan contexts. With their home-built flotation machine and a good selection of microscopes they have already found an array of micro-evidence which would otherwise have been completely missed. This ranges from seeds, tiny bones, metal particles, hammerscale and much, much more. The photos show the group in action.
November 2021
At last we can gather the Environmental group together after a very long break due to Covid.
The first activity is tidying up the samples still awaiting analysis. Brand new tubs for the occasion and soil samples transferred in just a couple of hours!
Some of our past activities which have given us much information about the dig site
Left: Discussing the flotation machine
Right: The group doing microscopic study on the contents of the black soils of the Saxon occupation levels
Right: Dry sifting of soils looking for small particles and for magnetic responses
Part of our Enviro lab
Samples waiting for analysis
Below: Examples of finds under the microscope and photographed by Brian Irwin
Left: Total magnetic content of context 24/003. Some occurs naturally in the soil, some is as a result of human activity.
Left: Flake and spherical hammerscale extracted from total mass. This gives an indication of smithing activity in this area of the excavation.
Fish scale
Onion skin
Shrew jaw bone
Charred wheat grain compared with modern grain