Nestled in rural north-west Norfolk, the village of Sedgeford is home to one of the longest-running research and training digs in the country. Now in its 25th digging season, Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) has since 1996 been investigating a rural middle-Anglo-Saxon site whose remains are unusually accessible. Unlike many other early medieval settlements, which tend to end up becoming buried beneath more modern buildings as they develop over time, the location of Sedgeford shifted by a few hundred yards c.AD 1000, meaning that its earlier incarnation is conveniently covered only by open farmland.
Spanning c.AD 700-950, Anglo-Saxon Sedgeford was inhabited in what appear to have been three distinct phases (see CA 299 and 333), during which a range of different features evolved. Between 1996 and 2007, SHARP explored a cemetery associated with the site; between 2007 and 2016, their main focus was the settlement itself; and, when CA visited the dig this summer, they were continuing their investigation (running since 2013) of a more industrial area thought to be home to a cereal-processing centre linked to malting.
Director of Excavations Dr Eleanor Blakelock explained how the story has progressed since we last covered the site. The features under investigation had originally emerged as a strange row of anomalies picked up by geophysical survey, and the SHARP team initially wondered whether they could be linked to iron smelting, as iron slag had been found in both the cemetery and settlement excavations. The possibility of furnaces intrigued Eleanor, who specialises in archaeometallurgy (see CA 297 for more about her work analysing the composition of the Staffordshire Hoard), but excavation soon revealed that the features had nothing to do with metalworking at all. Nor were they pottery kilns, as another proposal put forward. Instead, the team found large quantities of burnt grain, as well as traces of wattle-and-daub structures, leading them to speculate whether these might be cereal-drying ovens.
