the Trust excavates two Iron Age enclosures on remarkable site at Stanway

Today (11th January), Trust archaeologist Adam Wightman was working on the Trust’s report on our recent excavation of a site at Stanway near Colchester. For over 40 years we have undertaken various archaeological projects at Stanway Quarry and at Birch Quarry, ahead of extensions to their quarrying areas. We conducted an archaeological evaluation on this most recent site at Stanway Quarry in 2008. We started our excavation on the site in May 2015 and completed it at the end of December 2015. Adam has just started working on the site report here at Roman Circus House, the Trust’s HQ.

This was a large area excavation and only the preliminary results are available, so far. However, we already know that it is a remarkable site. It has produced considerable evidence of Middle Iron Age life at Colchester, which we don’t have much previous evidence for. Even more importantly, the site included the sites of two square, Middle Iron Age enclosures, and these are part of the strung-out complex of important Iron Age funerary enclosures which we excavated nearby in 1970-97 – the well-known Stanway burials of the native aristocracy. One of the enclosures on our recent site was defined by unusually deep ditches. This (the northern enclosure) included the site of a definite round-house, and the other (the southern enclosure) included the site of a possible round-house. The site of another, small, oval-shaped enclosure lay between the two square enclosures. The site of the southern enclosure was truncated by the edge of the quarry and it lay only 450 metres from the site of the Middle Iron Age enclosure at the important Stanway site. The seven enclosures were linked by a long ditch and would have formed what is sometimes called a ‘washing-line’ configuration of enclosures.

At the important Stanway site, we excavated five funerary enclosures which had been used for the burials of the native aristocracy in the Late Iron Age and the early Roman period. The burials included the ‘Doctor’s grave’ and the ‘Warrior’s grave’. This was a very important site and, archaeologically, it is of national importance. The Trust report on that site is titled Stanway: an elite burial site at Camulodunum and it is a Britannia monograph (no 24, published in 2007). Read more about the important Stanway site online at www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba99/feat3.shtml .

Trust pottery specialist Steve Benfield has made a preliminary review of the pottery from this site: most of the fragments of pottery are Middle Iron Age in date, that is, about 350 BC to the end of the 1st century BC. The site seems to have produced very little Late Iron Age pottery, although there is some Roman pottery. The Middle Iron Age pottery fragments represent mostly jars: these are plain, hand-made, sand-tempered vessels, typical of the period, and these provide the date for the domestic settlement here. The site produced mostly very fragmentary pottery but also some large fragments and partial pots. We also retrieved spindlewhorls and loomweights from the site, and these would have been used by the people who lived here to spin wool and weave fabric. This evidence of prehistoric domestic occupation is very similar to the evidence of Iron Age life which we uncovered on our recent site at Moverons Quarry at Brightlingsea.

All our archaeological projects at Stanway Quarry are funded by Tarmac.

The excavation was supervised by Adam Wightman and undertaken by a team of Trust excavators. Dave Glazin, a relative of Adam’s, visited the site at the Trust’s invitation and took video footage of the site using his drone: he has very kindly given us the footage and we have extracted still images from it. We plan to display the video footage in the Roman circus centre, in the ‘archaeology in action’ room.

The images show a rough plan of the site with the excavation results, a still image from the drone footage, and two site photo.s. The drone image shows the southern enclosure with the quarry works in the background. The site photo.s are of one of the ditches of the northern enclosure, with an excavator standing in one corner of the site of the enclosure and an excavator standing within the site of its round-house, and a feature being excavated by some of the Trust’s excavators. (The colours on the the plan represent the following periods: purple = predominantly Middle Iron Age, blue = medieval and early post-medieval, grey = tree-throw pits from prehistoric land clearance, orange = ditches shown on the 1881 Ordnance Survey map, and black = undated features/post-holes.)

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