TEST PITS
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEST PITS IN BINGHAM
List of Test Pits
LA15
60, LONG ACRE
SUMMARY
- There are only 50 cm of soil above the basal clay in this pit. It forms a natural sequence of organic topsoil on subsoil, but the distribution of finds is almost random and suggests that the soil has been turned over for agricultural purposes.
- Unusually, there is no building debris from the construction of the adjacent house.
- The pottery is not abundant, but it covers most periods from Roman to14th C. The most abundant early pottery is Nottingham Splashed Ware with a date range 1100 to 1250. In this respect it is very like the assemblages found in the pits dug on the other side of Jebb’s Lane in Warner’s Paddock. There is also some slag in this pit, which is similar to the abundant slag found in Warner’s Paddock and which is thought to be from a Late Saxon or early Norman smithy.
- The older pottery assemblage stops at the Black Death. Only one sherd of Cistercian Ware was found. This was made from around 1450. The time gap of about a century between the Black Death and the appearance of Cistercian Ware is common to several pits around this area.
- There are indications from this pit, as from the others nearby, that the land hereabouts was kept as pasture after the Black Death, in this case until the 19th C.
- The assemblage of Modern glazed wares, stoneware, glass and the clay pipes suggests that they represent activity in the 19th C. The site history shows that the area of the present garden was a garden piece used by one of the tenants who lived in the cottages that fronted on Long Acre. The 19th C pottery may have been their domestic rubbish or it could have arrived in the garden with night soil as manure.
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