Archaeological sites exposed in intertidal zones can be exceptionally rich in terms of their preservation of organic finds and environmental evidence. Such discoveries often follow storms, which erode sediments to expose underlying remains – but these may only be exposed for a few hours at low spring tides before they are covered again by mobile mud and sand, perhaps never to be seen again, or to re-emerge in changed form a decade later. Building up the full story of a site can therefore require decades of observations, as well as funding from multiple sources, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers – as the history of research over the last 33 years at Goldcliff in the Severn Estuary shows.
This work began in 1991, when a storm sparked the excavation of an Iron Age site located between the Prince of Wales Bridge (Second Severn Crossing) and Newport. Preserved within the estuary’s intertidal peats were the remains of eight rectangular Iron Age buildings and a series of trackways, and surviving environmental evidence revealed that these related to spring and summer grazing of cattle on the saltmarsh. They were not the only archaeological remains to emerge from this area, however: between 1991 and 1993 surveys (funded by Cadw) uncovered a Mesolithic site, two planks from a Bronze Age sewn-plank boat, and human skulls that had been deposited at the edge of a former bedrock island surrounded by wetland during the Bronze Age. Following these initial explorations, Dr Heike Neumann undertook a wider survey (funded by the Board of Celtic Studies) of the entire intertidal zone between Cardiff and the bridge, revealing a wealth of other sites – particularly those of Bronze Age date – some of which, including Redwick and Peterstone, would go on to be excavated. The headland at Goldcliff, the remains of a former island, would also prove to contain many more secrets than we first suspected.
As part of our early fieldwork, in 1993 we had identified the extensive remains of a submerged forest to the east of the former island – but, as it produced little other archaeological evidence, it was rather dismissed at the time. Fast forward to 2001, though, and our Reading University team succeeded in getting funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for a project studying Mesolithic to Neolithic Coastal Environmental Change. One of the submerged forests we decided to focus on was the apparently archaeologically unpromising area east of the island. We were lucky with our timing, as the Severn foreshore was relatively clear of mud and sand, and within a day of starting work we discovered human, animal, and bird footprints preserved in a 6m sequence of laminated silts which had accumulated as a result of sea-level rises, separating two Mesolithic submerged forest layers. The discovery of footprints was not unprecedented: the late Professor John Allen, who was a member of our project, had recorded footprints on several other sites in the estuary, and had collaborated with the late Professor Stephen Aldhouse-Green and others on the investigation of Mesolithic footprints identified 4km to the west at Uskmouth. The Goldcliff examples would add exciting new information to this growing picture.
