August 2006
August 2006
August 2006
We finished clearing the rubble fill in the green clay scoops that I talked about in my last diary and as usual it turned up something interesting. Below is a picture of my students making a plan of the area.
The two green clay scoops drop into round pits that have stones set into the edge of them.
We have no idea what they were used for but they do look surprisingly similar to an oval pit with a round pit beneath it we have elsewhere on the site.
The pits have actually been chipped out of the sedimentary rocks on the slope. These pits are in an area that is covered with copper oxides which indicates it was a copper processing area.
Feather pits
If you have looked at our website you will know about the feather pits we have been excavating for the last three years. If you haven't here is a brief run down of them:
On the eastern end of our main site we excavated (in 2001) the remains of a Mesolithic platform and the stake holes of a dwelling. As we followed these floors we came across pits dug into this floor, mostly rectangular and facing either east west, or north south.
In these pits we found extraordinary contents. Someone has killed a swan and skinned it and lined the pit with the breast feathers up. In the corner of each pit is a small pile of stones that come from the coast 10 miles away.
Sometimes the pits also contain an assortment of bird claws and different types of bird feathers. Because of the spring line underneath these feathers they are perfectly preserved.
Amazing contents of the feather pits
Out of the 28 pits we have excavated to date, 20 have had their contents removed in antiquity and 8 were complete. The ones that had their contents removed usually had just a few feathers or some of the stones to show us they had similar contents.
Feather lining
The most fascinating pit we found was actually round and it had the same swan feather lining, but inside two magpie bodies opposite each other and between them were 57 eggs from bantam size to duck egg size. Seven had fully formed chicks in them too.
As we have next to no funding we have only been able to send off one for radio carbon dating and that gave us a date of approximately the mid 1600's. Around the time of the civil war.
Royalist (and staunchly Catholic) Cornwall was taken over by the Parliamentarians.
Anyone caught practicing pagan rites (such as those exhibited in the feather pits) would have been in grave danger imprisonment as a witch – or possibly worse.
This is why we think the pits were dug in the marshy area, so you could not see any depressions in the ground where they were dug.
We began working on a new area next to the pits this week and have already found two more feather pits – we can't wait to see what the rest of the area reveals.
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