Wiltshire Archaeol Natur Hist Mag 101

Between 1984 and 1990, a series of archaeological investigations was undertaken in the area around Cleveland Farm, Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire, in advance of gravel extraction. Fieldwork revealed evidence for occupation of the site from the Middle/Late Iron Age through to at least the fourth century AD, with some indications of Early/Middle Saxon activity. Iron Age settlement comprised at least six small enclosures in the northern part of the site, interspersed with areas of open settlement. Environmental remains indicate a hedged landscape around the site, with little evidence for agriculture. Small scale iron smithing took place on the site, and two fragments of bronze-working moulds were also found. Local sources of supply predominate amongst the pottery and quernstone assemblages, but in the Late Iron Age more long-distance contacts are attested. There is little indication that the imposition of Roman rule was socially disruptive in the area, and settlement continued, after a shift in location to the south, through the Roman period, with a major restructuring in the third or fourth century AD. A range of structural remains, artefacts and environmental evidence illustrates the nature of the settlement at this period, with significant assemblages of pottery, coins, metalwork and animal bones, and with some preservation of waterlogged material. In contrast to the Iron Age, environmental evidence indicates the cultivation of spelt wheat and barley, both in the immediate vicinity of the site and in the wider landscape; the relatively high number of quernstones from this period could mean that the inhabitants were processing and redistributing cereals. Cattle still dominate the faunal assemblage, although there is some evidence for improvement of breeds, and perhaps the export of hides from the site for processing elsewhere. Textile-working and other craft or industrial activities are only sparsely attested, although the quernstone assemblage includes evidence for ironworking. Coin copying may also have been taking place during the late Roman period, when coins also provide hints of a possible temple on the site. Personal items such as jewellery were common finds, and `luxury' goods like imported pottery and glass suggest that the inhabitants of the site attained a relative level of affluence. A small number of inhumation burials, however, provided the only direct evidence of the population. Includes

Six seasons of excavations extended the villa plan already known from excavations of its east and north wings in the 1930s, to reveal an agricultural and residential complex arranged around three sides of a courtyard. An aisled building forming the west wing was fully excavated while the previously partly excavated north wing was re-excavated to reveal a bath-house suite at its west end. New features in the east part and an apse associated with the central room, unrecognised earlier, were also revealed. These buildings overlay an earlier layout of stone buildings on a different alignment. Although not directly dated, the latter seem likely to be of late-first- and second-century date to be succeeded by the courtyard buildings in the second century. These were successively enlarged with a final phase of rebuilding late in the fourth century when some rooms were used for corn-drying. The complexity of the later Roman sequence and the presence of objects more usually found in post-Roman contexts suggests that use of the building may have continued after the formal end of the Roman Province. Includes a CD-ROM of supporting data, available on request. Separately authored contributions include

Although there has in the past been no firm evidence-based knowledge of the site of the manor house in Potterne of the Bishop of Salisbury, local tradition claims that the buildings were located in the Great Orchard field abutting upon Court Hill. Between 1961 and 2007 several searches, four by excavation and two by resistivity, gradually revealed the probable location of the site. In 2007 eleven trenches, guided by resistivity survey, uncovered footings of medieval style similar to those of other local buildings. Pottery dated to the thirteenth century was found at the base of the footings, while a large quantity of fragments of ceramics, animal bones and stone roof tiles was also recovered. With no overall plan evident it is nonetheless concluded that the high status materials, including worked ashlar and encaustic tiles, would have belonged to a magnate of the Church.

Fieldwork reveals that a circular earthen bank with a perimeter of 5586m in the centre of Savernake Forest is the boundary of a single structure intended to exclude animals from a large enclosure. It can be positively related to records of a Tudor attempt to evict commoners and to restore woodland degraded by domestic stock and deer. At its southernmost point the bank was aligned to incorporate an existing, possibly prehistoric or early historic, cross valley dyke straddling Shovel Bottom. Documentation reveals that the commoners resisted their exclusion, and the project was probably abandoned; timber and underwood remained confined to the same coppices existing previously. In the latter-eighteenth century, the same area was converted to parkland, and the layout of rides focusing on Eight Walks was established, in consultation with Capability Brown. Hence the Great Inclosure's functions were reversed: instead of an area of `thick and strong wood' within scrubby heathland, as previously envisaged, it became open parkland, even when the surrounding land was covered in woodland plantations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is noted that the cross valley dyke in Shovel Bottom, and a comparable feature in Great Lodge Bottom, both straddle small chalk valleys, but cease when reaching the clay-with-flints alongside. They therefore replicate, at the small scale, the situation with the Wansdyke, which also has gaps across areas of clay. It is conjectured that these cross valley dykes demarcated valuable arable land, which was held territorially amidst a landscape otherwise used as a common pool resource for pasturage and hunting.

Notes on the Stourhead Collection of objects, including finds made by Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington I in excavations in Wiltshire and Cranborne Chase in Dorset during the early-nineteenth century. The author discusses the difficulties in identifying the provenance of many objects in the collection. In particular he describes a Beaker-phase stone bracer and a jet `pulley ring', which appear to be two of the objects found at a Beaker burial in Tring, Herts, and published in Archaeologia volume 8 (1787).

The author discusses the Celtic origin and meaning of the placename Kemble on the border of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

The author discusses various seventeenth-century representations of Stonehenge, including those published in Joshua Childrey's Britannia Baconica (published in English, 1660, and French, 1667) and in William Camden's Britannia (fifth edition, 1600, onwards), and the `RF' engraving in the British Library, with the aim of identifying the first published illustration of the monument.

Highlights from the group's programme.

descriptions of some significant finds, arranged chronologically by archaeological period

including a separate coins register