Monument record IKL 128 - Weatherhall Farm

1997: Four(?) small training excavations within site IKL 057. Details to follow? (S1).

Four weeks of excavation established the existence of complex undisturbed archaeological deposits within the field and showed a more complex, multi-phase, picture than had previously been drawn from maps and geophysical evidence.
The section of Roman road surface and associated ditches previously identified was further investigated. It was established that the main road surface overlay earlier Roman features, which were not excavated. At later dates, up to the 18th century, the road had been reused and new ditches cut through the earlier surfaces. From one of these, a coin of 1699, was recovered. At some date before the tithe award map of 1815, the road was moved to its present line: some 50m north of the Roman road. To the north of the Roman road was an area of cultivated soil, some 50cm in depth, which produced pottery of Roman to modern date. Beneath this was a pit containing the skeleton of a horse, without associated artefacts, which cannot be dated stratigraphically more closely than late Roman to 18th century. This cut a human burial, a female lying face down within the fill of one of the ditches associated with the Roman road. Burial was regulated in the Roman period and took place within organised cemeteries outside settlements. This burial is therefore atypical, although not without parallels. Such burials have been seen as evidence for the breakdown of society at the end of the Roman period, but it is possible that in rural areas unofficial practices existed at an earlier date, such as depositing burials in roadside ditches. In either case, this is an example of a type of burial which deserves further investigation. Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 1999 (S2).