Our aim at Elmswell Farm is to produce a timeline spanning the site’s history, filling in blanks left where previous generations of archaeologists have been unable to join the dots between one period and another.
So far, we’ve been focussing on the medieval settlement and why it was abandoned. This year, we’ll start exploring what we can learn about the transitional periods between Iron Age and Roman, and Roman and Anglo-Saxon life at the ladder settlement
We also want to characterise the extent of Roman settlement on the farm; we know there’s a ladder settlement, but there are also traces of other Roman activity around the site; tesserae, roof tiles, and a few champion discoveries that we’re not quite ready to disclose publicly yet…
But that’s not all. In the future, we hope we might be able to extend the excavation into areas that can help us examine Yorkshire life even further back in time. Will we be able to unearth evidence of Yorkshire’s Bronze Age inhabitants? Can we trace them all the way to the Mesolithic?
Everything we’ve seen at Elmswell Farm so far suggests that yes, we can. We can see the site’s potential, and we hope you can too!
