After a long and hard trail of thought, have decided to post my personal account of the dig. As a good friend said, history belongs to us all. On a seperate note, the MPP talk was very good- a lot of theories and lots of "we'll have to wait for carbon dating" until conclusions can be made. Did anyone else manage to get to it? If so, would be interesting to know what you think.
The dig - a personal account...
Firstly the site is a magnificent place - so beautiful and it's really not suprising why something was built there! Truely awe inspiring location.
A group of us were assigned to dig various test pits at the site before the student Archs came to the site the following week. I was lucky enough to be assigned to a TP (1m x 1m) inside the henge where actually we found less worked flint inside than we did outside in the other TPs I was lucky enough to be assigned to. A lot of hard graft de-turfing and sieving in glorious weather. The second TP I was in, which was north of the henge pulled up a figure in excess of 150 pieces of worked flint, some dating to mesolithic - again a 1mx1m TP around 3 footish deep. MPP was pleased with this result and said that these relative numbers could only be compared with the Durrington Walls flint numbers - interesting train of thought if you ask me. I also found a rather lovely meso blade which I was chuffed to bits with as you can imagine!
When we first arrived, MPP thought there may have been a neo long barrow in the field but further investigations proved it wasn't to be.
There was a lot of medieval activity on the site and towards the end of the dig, a lot of the inexperienced were placed in these trenches whilst the experienced were blessed with the post holes and the henge (to be expected!), although they were very keen to keep us in the loop by doing tours of the suspected human bone that was found and other interesting soil colours.
MPP and his colleagues were very very nice, especially Jim who was magnificent with explainations of flint and other things.
At the last point I was at the dig, we had found a small piece of bluestone, the sort of size that can fit in your hand.
During the MPP talk on saturday, he drew a lot of comparisions with Coneybury Henge (which isnt that far away I believe?) and other henges in the welsh area. He also said that one of the stone impressions on the dig, looks very similar to a standing stone at Stonehenge and he thought the stones may have been recycled up there. He also spent a lot of time discussion Marden Henge during "question time".
Obviously everything above is what I knew at the time of the dig when I was present and as we all know, thoughts and theories change!
So, there we have it, my brief personal account, with no comprimising information and I can only hope informative to everyone reading and whetting the appetite for MPPs full report which I believe is coming out next year, I think!
Lilydee05 x
