CONTENT WARNING: this post contains photographs of human bone fragments   During an excavation in Saggy Horse Field in 2019, a cremation urn and associated votive pottery were found. This is the second cremation burial excavated by SHARP, after excavating “the body in the oven” in 2006, an individual who was buried in the oven of a Roman grain drier with flue system. Map of Sedgeford cremation burials A cremation is the act of burning a human body as a way of treating the dea

CONTENT WARNING: this post contains photographs of human bones   In the 2025 season, the human remains team spent several weeks in The Church of St Mary the Virgin in Sedgeford. We ran our annual week-long “Introduction to Human Remains” course, as well as two weeks of human remains volunteers.   During the course, we cover basic skeletal anatomy, and how to assess human remains to determine an individual’s age at death, sex, height, and any illnesses or injuries they may hav

Despite the obvious interest in the car park trench and all the finds/exciting discoveries being made there, the malting site trench was never disserted. Some weeks we even managed to have more volunteers than we expected, going to show that archaeology is not all about finds. With a good core set of regular volunteers each week, keen to work on the amazing features we made huge progress and have increased yet again our understanding of the site.   This blog will summarise th

It was an excellent year for Enviro. This was the first season in a brand-new home, the wooden Enviro cabin with a special sign above the door. The cabin had been built specially for us in the closed season and it was greatly appreciated having this good working environment. There was a ready stream of willing volunteers and they cleared a record amount of samples. In the 2024 season, we had 246 litres of samples come in. This year, we received over 1,000 and kept the work up

We are excited to announce that we have received funding from the Farming in Protected Landscape Programme (FiPL) to renovate our information centre into a Heritage Education Centre. They have 100% funded the project, which means we won’t have to crowdfund to top it up, although SHARP will need to cover some of the costs of infrastructure around the build. This funding will allow us to completely strip out the cabin and create from scratch a much more inviting and informative

A couple of weeks ago a small group of team members were on site to do some maintenance work, and test some theories that will allow us to make decisions going forward.   The work we carried out mostly focused around the two cabins that we are planning to renovate in this year; the information hut and kitchen. We also used some of the time to assess the remaining work required to finish our new toilet block.   On arrival on Thursday afternoon the team assessed the condition o

As 2025 is coming to an end, the SHARP team are working hard behind the scenes to prepare for the upcoming 2026 SHARP season. There is a lot for the SHARP executive committee to consider, particularly with increasing costs in catering. We will therefore be officially opening bookings and launching our 2026 season courses in early November.   At this stage we can confirm the date of the season itself so that people can start to plan in advance. The season will be slightly late

The 2025 season saw the installation of our very own solar power array on site following a successful trial with a commercially hired...

A few weeks have passed since the season now and the team have had a chance to rest. We would like to take this opportunity to thank...

The malting excavations has been going on for many years now. As many people know the amount of daub recovered from the site has been...