We have begun excavations at Cholsey, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, on behalf of Bellway Homes Limited. These exciting investigations have been designed to look at how the landscape was used in Prehistory, with the geophysical survey already providing hints at the sorts of features we might expect to find.
Initially our thoughts are that we have a couple of droveways (parallel ditches to help herd livestock), offset by a series of fields for managing and compartmentalizing the various farming practices.
However, the joy of archaeology is at this stage we simply don’t know and this could completely change as we dig deeper!
These are difficult times and the restrictions caused by COVID has made it much more awkward to provide the open days and tours we’d otherwise be undertaking. This week, however, Bellway Homes Limited provided a group of local school children with a tour of the excavations, where they learnt about their village’s past: from the Mammoth remains found just a few hundred metres from our site, to the discoveries we are currently making (including some lovely worked flints discovered while they were onsite!).
We’ll be adding photos of the finds from the site over the coming weeks. Join us on our adventures as we provide weekly updates following the progress of our team, what questions they are able to answer and the new ones that arise as we make further discoveries!