Monument record WSW 136 - Sunken House recording, demolition and excavation at West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village

2015 Building recording and Excavation: As part of the ongoing experimental archaeological work at West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village, a modern sunken-floored building (sometimes referred to as a Grubenaus or sunken-featured building) was dismantled and recorded because the structure showed signs of degradation. The underlying pit an its associated features were then excavated. This particular building was referred to as Sunken House and formed part of the series of experimental reconstructions which were built from 1973 onwards in order to test various hypotheses about how sunken floored/featured buildings were made and used. The original premise of building this example was to disprove that this method of construction was that used by the Anglo-Saxons, that the sunken floored structures were impractical and did not leave behind comparable remains. It also provided data on the longevity of such structres and how much of the timber wold have been reusable. During the works it became clear that the structure had probably outlived the typical lifespan of an SFB. The majority of the timbers from the structure proved to be reusable, several either had failed or were rapidly deteriorating. The excavation of the pit showed that the structure has left a different archaeological profile to that of archaeologically excavated SFBs (possibly as a result of lacking a suspended floor or lining to the pit but potentially also due to its lifespan).
The finds from the Sunken House consist of both much earlier, abraded pottery and flint work, which comes from the layers into which the pit was dug, and modern material which indicated material that was in-situ and representative of the usage of the building, rather than mass dumps of tertiary deposits as appears to be the case in traditional SFBs. Despite this it has not been conclusively shown that the sunken-floored structures did not exist, but simply that this particular design was not an accurate representation, and/or used and demolished in the traditional manner (S1).

Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2015 (S2).