Bookings now being taken for our

2010 season

(April 2010 - August 2010)

Booking early to avoid disappointment

No places available week's beginning 1st & 22nd August

 

 

Welcome to another season at Saveock. We sent out a new poster this year that one of our diggers made to the universities to advertise our 10^th season and have been told that some people have got the wrong idea about Saveock. On the poster it says ‘Training Dig’ apparently a lot of people think this means that you spend the first week here in a lecture room being taught about digging and only excavate fake artefacts in a sand pit! Sorry if this is the impression we have given as this is far from the case. The archaeology itself at Saveock is phenomenal on any scale you like to think about but we teach people from the first day here in the field on the site itself. Of course the first few days if you have no experience you might be digging topsoil until we teach you how to trowel properly, but you are digging on site and you will find some finds. We believe that the best place to learn is in the field doing what professional archaeologists do. Class room teaching is no substitute for getting your hands dirty and emptying buckets. We do have set features on site to teach section drawing and planning but these are real features not made up ones. You will be taught on a one to one basis how to plan on a very tricky part of the main site and at the end of the day we lay your plan over the one we have done of the feature so you can really learn how to plan. It is no good telling someone their test plan is great and then they go to another dig with a feeling they are brilliant at planning only to find they have a bit more to learn about the subject.  Learning excavation techniques is not rocket science but after a bit of practice in the field everyone can do it.

 

We have the booking form on the education page with information about local student recommended accommodation and a sample of our typical lunch menu. We believe if you are going to learn how to dig you might as well have a good lunch while you are about it! No experience is necessary just an enthusiasm to discover what people did in the past and meet interesting people from all walks of life in the trenches.  

There is a tour of our facilities page, so you can see we are not a porta cabin in a muddy field. We are a well equipped research excavation that believes archaeology should be available to anyone who wants to learn how to dig.

 

 For those of you new to the site for the first time here is a brief synopsis of the earlier phase of the excavation in this sheltered river valley in Mid Cornwall. The site covers a period from the Mesolithic to 17th century Pagan Swan feather pits (more information about these can be found by clicking on the link in the Feather Pits section on the right of this page). In the Mesolithic the main site trench was over a south facing peat bank on the bend of a river that was between two shallow lakes. This entire site has been purposely covered with various different coloured clays in an attempt to make the river bank a suitable place for dwellings. In the area A/2 the first phase of the site, is what we believe to be a Mesolithic dwelling platform covered with dense green clay surrounded by stony yellow clay in which the stakes to support the dwelling were driven. The next phase we believe (and the jury is still out on this) is the use of the constant spring line to make some sort of Neolithic ritual area. We say ritual because we cannot think of any conceivable reason why people would make stone lined drains covered with 30cm of green admix clay. Then manufacture a large rectangular pool lined with white quartz cores, unless it was for some ritual purpose. In season five (2005) we found another rectangular pool next to the original this one only fills with water from a spring in the bank at the back of it in mid Winter.

 

These features are at present unique in Cornish or from what we have researched British archaeology. The only similar feature we have found is the Neolithic clay platform that is underneath the Maeshowe monument on Orkney. A trench put into this platform revealed a stone lined drain almost identical to ours.  Jacqui Wood