We sent some of the coins found this season off for conservation by Karen Barker. These recently returned and James took a quick look and the results were really interesting! Of the corroded coins we sent off to Karen most were identifiable when they returned. Three of these were coins of the House of Valentinian (Reece Period 19). Keen readers of this blog may remember that we were puzzled by the absence of these coins, Well, it turns out they weren’t absent at all but simply corroded!

The new coin diagram. Now we have some in Period 19!

In other news we’ve arranged for some of our finds to be drawn by archaeological illustrator Mark Hoyle. It’s great to have Mark working with us and we hope to post some of his illustrations in due course.

Finally, congratulations to Andy. Our long-suffering and hard-working custard-cream eating co-director has landed himself a part-time role working as a Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme.  Who said there was no future in the past?

When Hayward and his team dug the villa in the 1940s and 1960s archaeological science was in its infancy. Today we have a whole array of scientific techniques that can be used to shed new light on the villa and its inhabitants.

Above: Hayward’s excavations

The starting point was taking all of our samples over to local archaeological firm GeoFlo. GeoFlo are specialists in wet sieving archaeological soil samples. Over the next few weeks Nigel and Liz will run wet sieve all of our samples – burnt seeds and the like will float (known as the ‘flot‘) and these will be sent to various specialists for analysis. Shells of molluscs and other tiny fragments of fish bone and the like will be caught in sieves with tiny meshes. These tiny fragments will also need to be sent to various archaeological scientists.

Lufton is a long way from the coast and one of the things that we’re quite interested in is determining where all the oysters came from. There are tow logical options: the Dorset coast or the Bristol Channel. Ancient oyster specialist Dr Jessica Winder will look at our oysters and we hope that she’ll be able to shed light on this element of our villa’s inhabitants.

Above: Oyster shells on the tessellated pavement – a late Roman snack?

Finally, we took a soil micromorphology sample from the burnt deposits that Hayley and Co. excavated. This sample, in a kubiena tin, is going to Cambridge University to be prepared and thin sectioned. Newcastle’s Dr Lisa-Marie Shillito will then undertake the analysis of this sample and hopefully tell us how these deposits accumulated.

Above: Burnt deposits in Room 1

It’s been a week since we all returned from Somerset. Most of us (James and Andy included) have been taking it easy after a grueling four weeks in the field and in anticipation of the start of the academic year.

One of the bits of Lufton related work James has been up to is provisionally cataloging the uncleaned coins. Just for interest’s sake the barchart below shows all of the excavated and identifiable (so far!) coins excavated from Lufton (this year and by Hayward) as per mills values by Reece period. As a point of comparison Phillipa Walton‘s British Mean values are included too.

This is a VERY PROVISIONAL analysis but the strength of Lufton in the early to mid fourth century AD is very noticeable. One of the odd aspects of this year’s excavation was our failure to find any coins later than AD364. Late fourth century coins are quite common at villas in the West Country and we’re not sure why ours are missing (especially as Hayward found three coins of the House of Valentinian).

James reckons about 15 coins will need to be cleaned and conserved. This will happen in October. It’ll be interesting to see if they change the above diagram…

It was a busy day on site today but the team managed to make a brilliant discovery of a tessellated floor. This pavement is in a room that occupies an area that Hayward had thought was outside of the villa entirely.

At the start of the day, James G was hoping to work off some of Josh’s excess energy by having him, Jeff, Frankie and Elliot hack out some of the overlying rubble deposits in the North East corner of the trench.

However, after a near miss with the mattock, Elliot struck some tesserae. These quickly grew into what was clearly a full paved floor. The pavement is suffering from some subsidence but otherwise appears at the moment to be a plain grey floor.

Elsewhere in the trench, Hayley, Doug and James B worked hard to record and take off the clay layer which was overlying the burnt deposit on the east side of the trench. They topped the day off by taking a micromorphology sample from their deposit and cleaning up the surrounding contexts.

Becca and Lucy continued their adventures in archaeological recording by planning walls and contexts for the whole day while Freddie cleaned up the loose over the walls and Tilly worked on the water pipe channel in the Southern end of the trench.

The team are all very excited about their new discovery and are looking forward to finishing their work in Lufton soon.