Pretty Prehistoric

Flint, flint and more flint! It’s Day Five at Leiston Abbey, and today it’s all about the worked flint being found in Trench One. 

See all the pictures from Day Five of Saints & Secrets on our Flickr page here 

Read our blog post below and watch the video….

It’s been a fantastic Friday here on site full of sunshine and exciting things happening on site! In Trench One it’s been all about the prehistoric flint work, which we have been finding lots of in the ditch. We have also found some prehistoric worked flint in the post hole that sits next to the ditch (which we thought at first was a pylon hole!). Who would have thought we would dig up so many prehistoric finds on a medieval monastic site?!? From digging into the post hole feature we can see it is actually a burnt area with scorched edges and through the process of wet sieving we have also found some bits of charcoal and tiny burnt flint fragments appearing. So the ditch and post hole are looking to be prehistoric and separate from the other ditch in this trench – which we think is a medieval overflow from the moat.

Speaking of the moat – the moat ditch has had all the top soil removed and it is in the process of being cleaned back so we can start excavating. The trench in the car park is also being cleared back so that is it ready for the diggers to move in tomorrow. In the process of mattocking we haven’t found a king, but we did find a rather exciting plastic bottle top! Hopefully we will get to the good stuff in this trench tomorrow!