Flint finds from my folks garden, no nothing I've made

[Alex]

Appears that I may have two phases of ploughing.

http://www.thelovens.co.uk/wag/html/garden_archaeology.htm

[Matt]

It does look like medieval plough marks.
Is the medieval pottery mixed up with/or above/ or below the flint?

Have you put a sondage through the medieval plough marks to see if there's anything below?

Nice work Al, it looks good.

[Alex]

The Medieval Pottery was mixed up with the flint, though the flint was in much greater abundance, the flint became much less abundant the deeper I went with only one flake found at the bottom of one of the ridges and a similar pattern emerged for the pottery, though in much less quantity. Could this be a product of ploughing or was the flint introduced from somewhere else, is something I'm going to have to answer.

Another thing to note was the near complete absence of stones from the furrows and the reverse with the ridges where a lot of large pebbles and glacially deposited stone are in greater quantities. It appears that whoever was ploughing here, as they went along removed the larger stones.

I'm going to record the sondage I did through the later plough onto the faint trace of the earlier phase and then once I'm happy I haven't missed anything I shall go down furthur to test if there is prehistoric landscape intact or whether, as I suspect, the plough has gone through whatever prehistoric activity was going on here.

[Alex]

The faint lines of possible earlier plough seem to be on top of the natural layers of sand. I think that it is quite likely that the ploughing has gone through the prehistoric landscape and moved around any of the archaeology.

[Matt]

It must be nice to have such clear features, sometimes they can be so amorphous.
Is it my eyes or is there a slight camber above the upper set of plough marks on the enhanced picture?

The lower (plough marks?) appear to be narrower than the upper set. Unless they have been truncated by the later ploughing and all we can see are the bases of the earlier plough furrows? - I wonder how much earlier they are? They also seem to be more widely spaced.

[Alex]

It was nice to have such prominent features to excavate, the disctinct boundaries between the sand and the soil. There does appear to a camber, but the curve is made up not by a continuous curve of sand but by a few peaks and troughs. The ridges seem to have flat sections on them in the middle, seen in profile. I'll put some more photo's up today.

The earlier plough marks are narrower, but like you say, they are most likely the very base of the earlier plough. I excavated one of these features and found it to be less than a centimetre in depth. I'm not sure about dates for these as the only artefacts I found at this level was a piece of brick/tile and flint flake under one of the later ridges at the same level as the earlier phase. I'll get some drawings up showing the earlier and later plough lines as soon as I can scan them in.