We have recently had an exciting opportunity to understand more about the origins and development of the historic North Wiltshire market town of Calne. Throughout October and November, Worcestershire Archaeology (WA) have been undertaking a full excavation of plot of land to the east of the High Street in Calne. The work was commissioned by Churchill Retirement Living for development into a Residential Home for which they had planning consent. The excavation follows an earlier phase of evaluation by WA in 2016 where a sequence of buried features and deposits from Saxon to post-medieval had been revealed.

The site lies in a part of the town is thought to have been an early medieval addition to the Saxon settlement of Calne which largely lay to the south of the river around the parish church. This ‘laid out’ settlement comprised the High Street and market places from which long narrow ‘burgage plots’ were established to provide each property fronting the High Street to have sufficient space to the rear to be able to grow food, keep animals and carry out small scale industry. Historic maps depict the site divided into four or five of these burgage plots stretching between the High Street and The Pippins (formerly Back Lane). In recent decades, the site has been terraced and divided by garden walls and partially used as a car park.

The following is a summary of the findings from WA:

CMAS are excited to be working on the conservation of two Roman copper alloy items recently excavated by Foundations Archaeology.

The site at Cholsey, South Oxfordshire is thought to be an Iron Age settlement which evolved into a Roman Villa site. The villa buildings have been preserved in situ, but excavations were carried out on almost 2 hectares of land surrounding them.

The excavations revealed numerous burials and enclosures including a number of impressive corn driers.

Interestingly the archaeologists propose that the site was a prosperous farm that evolved to a villa, unusual as villas were more commonly set up by representatives of the empire.

CMAS are conserving a copper alloy necklace with a circular pendant, possibly made from bone, and a large copper alloy bowl.

The bowl was found upturned within the base of a corn drier, on top of charcoal deposits.

The backfill from the demolition of the corn drier was deposited on top of the bowl. This shows that the bowl was deposited at the time that use of the drier ceased, possibly as a closing offering and that this was done at the same time as closure of the site, not at a later date.