There’s nothing more oddly satisfying than pieceing evidence back together, and that’s what our Finds Team has been doing – literally! During our excavations of a Roman town at East Park, on the outskirts of Sedgefield, we discovered a large number of broken pottery fragments. Although we could tell they were Roman, we couldn’t tell what type of vessel they were from:

That was until our Finds Team pieced it all back together, to reveal the full shape of the pot. We now know that the pot dates from the 2nd-3rd century AD (100-200 AD).

This beautiful artefact was originally found placed inside a pit within the Roman settlement, along with another 86 sherds pot, a broken quern AND a roman coin:

We’ve also been examining another amazing Roman bowl from our dig at Sedgefield. Our archaeologists found this in another small pit within the settlement:

It likely dates from the first half of the 2nd century AD (between 100-150 AD). What’s really cool is that when we turned it over after cleaning, we saw a unique squiggly star-shaped decoration on the bottom:

Our pottery experts are now putting the final touches to their analysis, which will soon be available when we publish our official Dig Report. Stay tuned…

Post-excavation analysis relies on two things: recording and finds. And boy do we have a lot of those!

Interested in seeing what exactly we found? Learning about our current thoughts? And how it all links back to the Prince Bishops? We’ve got the thing for you. Just because the dig is over doesn’t mean we’re finished yet!

Check out our calendar to see our upcoming events! With an exciting talk on architecture and a live look into our finds room, there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

Find out more

Today is the day, time to say goodbye to Bishop Middleham Castle for now. On site, they’re backfilling the trenches. Back at HQ, we’re prepping for the next step: analysis!

Even though we’re sad to leave, we’re all super excited to see what we find out next.

Raphael is also busy today, getting some samples before we close up. These samples will be taken away and analysed to see if there’s anything in there that can help us learn more about the site.

It’s our penultimate day on site today and things are getting busy! The team in Trench 3 are busy doing section drawings before we backfill. Jodie and Jen are recording all our features in a section drawing. This is a really detailed drawing that captures all the details of the walls so we can look back later.

It’s a nice sunny day for it! Not great for photos though…

Ben spotted something a bit funny on one of our walls today. Can you guess what it is?

It is in fact… a hoof print! The area here is mortar, so we think that what might have happened is when they were constructing it, they poured the mortar and left it for a while. And in this brief period, something stumbled across it – literally! We’re not sure what critter this print belongs to yet, but a closer look will be able to tell us more.

Back in 2019, the team noticed something a bit funny about one of our walls… there’s a hole in it! We wondered what this hole could be for a long time, and when we found it again this year we decided it was time to investigate it properly.

We had one theory that seemed to fit the bill, could this be a sort of drain for medieval toilet? If that was the case, the hole would continue through the wall and we’d see another gap at the bottom where the sewerage would escape. So, we decided to dig down!

After weeks of careful and steady excavation, we found it! There seems to be another hole in the bottom of the wall. This doesn’t prove anything for sure, but it definitely makes our theory seem more likely.

David is busy in Trench 4 cleaning some of the huge number of walls. Cleaning sounds like a bit of a strange term considering he’s in a muddy trench, but it’s actually a really important part of archaeology.

Cleaning means removing the top layer of soil and any crumbs that might be scattered over the archaeology, literally cleaning it up so it looks nice and exposed. When it’s clean, it means we can record it and get a proper, clear picture of all the different elements of the wall, in this case. In cases where we only have impressions of features in the soil (e.g. ditches) it’s extra important because it helps to highlight the changes in soil colour.

Good work, David!

Ben has finally excavated that lovely vessel fragment that was hanging out in our section. Isn’t it beautiful? A lovely example of medieval pottery. You can almost imagine the Prince Bishop using it!

Pottery is one of the ‘big three’ finds you get on medieval sites, we also see a lot of animal bone and nails. These are more common than other things because this site was well and truly stripped of any valuable over the hundreds of years. But, they can still tell us a fair bit about what was going on here!