The pottery itself looks remarkably modern, and were it not for the fact that it’s unglazed, you would not be surprised to see it holding salt or sugar on a modern-day kitchen table. Most of the Nene valley production sites are known, and to walk across one is a strange experience, especially when the land has recently been ploughed. You walk into what seems like a perfectly ordinary flat field, and suddenly have a strange feeling, as if you were walking on thousands of broken ostrich eggs. The ‘eggs’ are sherds of pottery, and they’re crunchy underfoot.
Exactly how these huge quantities of pottery found their way from the industrial suburbs of a Roman town to the field boundary ditches of Fenland farms ten miles away is still a mystery to me. But that’s what happened. Maybe the local peasants were employed by the wealthy pot-factory owners to smash the stuff, in order to keep prices up? Or maybe they were mad? Or just careless? Or perhaps, like farmers today, they simply took their animals to market and bought the pottery, cheap, while they had money in their pockets.
Sandy was sure that a trench across the two parallel ditches would establish their date. Once that was done we could start investigating the possible wells, which were potentially far more interesting. I agreed, and we sent the digger off to remove the topsoil, closely watched by one of our supervisors.
Later that afternoon I walked across to the trench. I looked in, and saw the two ditches, just as they appeared on the air photo. Then I glanced in the finds trays by each ditch, and was slightly puzzled. There were a few scraps of bone, probably of cattle; a small flint flake, of no particular date, but certainly pre-Roman; and two tiny scraps of soft hand-made pottery, again probably prehistoric. Only one find was of any interest, and it could have been Roman or earlier. It was a small piece of baked clay ‘daub’.
Although the Romans introduced mortar and plaster to Britain, the ordinary country people still usually lived in roundhouses built in the traditional pre-Roman, or Iron Age, manner. The walls were made from woven hazel ‘wattles’, which resembled coarse basketwork. This wattlework core was then smeared with a thick layer of clay, usually mixed with straw and cow dung to give it flexibility and strength. The mix of clay and straw was known as ‘daub’. When a house burnt down, which happened quite often, the clay became fired, rather like crude pottery. This firing meant it could survive in the soil indefinitely – ultimately for archaeologists to discover. The piece of daub in my hand was like others I had excavated. I could clearly see the impression left by one of the woven wattles of the wall core. That was encouraging. At least we now had evidence of a house, or houses, somewhere in the vicinity of the two ditches.
The single flint and the tiny piece of pottery could have been in the topsoil for several centuries before the Roman British farmer dug out his trackway ditches. To use the technical word, they were probably ‘residual’ from an earlier period. The fragments of animal bone couldn’t be dated. So we were no further forward. Still, we were digging real archaeology on our first day; the sheds were up and water-tight, and the crew hadn’t tried to lynch me. All in all, it had been a good start.
The next day it rained as it can only rain in a green and pleasant land. By the end of the afternoon our two ditches were filled to the brim, so when I got back to the house I had rented in town that evening I ordered the digger to return the next day. The driver, Chris Clapham, arrived bright and early, and I decided we should simply extend the trench we had started on the first day and cut another section through the ditches. We could always return to the two flooded sections when they had dried out. Failing that, we could hire pumps, but that was expensive. Then, at the end of the day I had a thought. What on earth was I doing clearing little trenches and fiddling around in this small-minded fashion? Surely my aim was to think big – to think in terms of whole landscapes? So I retained the digger, and did not send it back to the depot. Chris, who soon became very interested in the project and who worked with us for several years, was delighted. It was clear that he was always sad to have to return to normal construction work at the end of each season.
By the time I had finished with Chris and the digger, about five days later, we had exposed the two ditches, and the trackway between them, for a distance of some forty metres. The rain held off, and then the weather began to improve. The sun shone, birds sang, and all was suddenly well with the world. We removed the loose earth left by the digger with shovels, and then used onion-hoes to scrape the surface clean. When we had done this, the dark soil which filled the two ditches showed up quite distinctly as two rich brown parallel lines.
My suspicions were first aroused while we were still scraping the machine-cleared ground surface with the onion-hoes. I had deliberately positioned myself in such a way that I was scraping down the centre of the most southerly of the two ditches. Normally I would have expected to find small, worn sherds of Roman pottery at the top of a filled Roman ditch. But there weren’t any. Not so much as a scrap. It was peculiar.
About a month into the dig, I had to return briefly to Toronto to make the final arrangements for an exhibition of finds from North Elmham that Peter Wade-Martins had kindly loaned to the Royal Ontario Museum. I was away for three weeks, and on my return I learned, to my utter amazement, that we had still not found anything in either of the two ditches that could be reliably dated. There was certainly nothing even remotely Roman. Poor Anne was getting fed up with the trickle of scrappy finds. To vent her frustrations – and I couldn’t blame her – she decided to lay everything we had found to date on a table in the Finds Shed, for me to see on my first day back on site.
Through hollow, jet-lagged eyes I viewed Anne’s tabletop exhibition. I was already feeling a bit low, but this display of scrappy potsherds, like so many crumbs of wet digestive biscuit, together with mis-shaped pieces of clay ‘daub’ and nondescript splinters of bone was, quite frankly, pathetic. It was almost more than I could bear. ‘What on earth,’ I thought, ‘will Doug make of this? I’ll arrive in his office at the end of my first season of excavation for the ROM proudly bearing a shoe-box of finds before me. “There,” I’ll announce, “that’s what you paid thousands of dollars to discover.” ’ No, I couldn’t bear it – it was too depressing for words.
I think my misery must have communicated itself to Anne, whose eyes had gone moist. She was starting to bite her lip. I put an arm around her shoulder and was about to make some pathetic excuse along the lines of ‘Honestly Anne, it’s not the finds, it’s just the jet-lag,’ when the door was noisily kicked open. We almost jumped out of our skins. It was Sandy holding a finds tray which contained something which looked like – I rushed across to have a closer look – which looked like … a large lump of mud.
Somehow I concealed my extreme disappointment (not to mention irritation) and picked the thing up. I turned it over carefully in both hands, in case it fell to bits – and it was just as well that I did, because on the underside I saw that what looked like earth was not earth, but grey-coloured baked clay. A sharp-eyed student digging in one of the trackway ditches had spotted this too, and had put the entire lump in the tray.
Although the clay had been quite lightly fired, possibly by being dropped into a bonfire for an hour or so, it held together well and I was able to remove the earth that clung to its surface. As I gently lifted off the soil, piece by piece, the object began to take on a familiar shape. By now I was getting excited, and was having trouble preventing my hands from trembling. Three or four students who were working in the Finds Shed sensed this excitement and drew close around me, partially obscuring the light. But I didn’t care.
I turned the object gingerly on its end, and suddenly recognised it for what it was. So did everyone else. As if on a command, every head rose, and the frowns of a few minutes ago were replaced by the broadest of smiles. The object in my hand resembled a large, short length of giant macaroni, and weighed as much as a bag of sugar. It was the hole through the centre that had made us all look up. It was round and neat, and just big enough to fit one’s thumb. We all knew it could only be one thing. I was ecstatic. I could have hugged everyone. Instead, being British,
