This September, members of the Thames Discovery Programme joined CITiZAN (the Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network) for their week-long training and fieldwork sessions on the Isles of Scilly. In this blog, Senior Community Archaeologist for the London-based Thames Discovery Programme, Josh Frost, tells us about experience discovering the archaeology of a very different foreshore…
Our trip to the Isles of Scilly provided a fantastic opportunity for members of the Thames Discovery Programme team to see a fellow MOLA foreshore community project and their volunteers in action. It also meant that we got the chance to experience some very different intertidal archaeological sites to the ones we have on the River Thames.
The Isles of Scilly have some fascinating and unique archaeology. The waters between the Islands can be shallow and on particularly low tides it’s possible to walk between several of the islands. It is a very vulnerable environment, archaeology is threatened by sea level rises, and regularly damaged by storm surges from the Atlantic. The islands’ location, at the entrances to the Bristol Chanel and the English Channel, has made them a base for trade and defence for millennia.
We started the week by helping the CITiZAN team deliver one of their fieldwork training sessions with volunteers from Scilly and a few from further afield. The Isles are home to some fascinating archaeological sites that are continually eroded by winds, waves and the increasing frequency of major storms, one of these being a Bronze Age settlement site which is eroding out of the cliff face. There are several Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement sites on the islands, and many Bronze Age entrance grave chambers, which had a similar function to barrows on the mainland. Much of the prehistoric archaeology that is now on the coast was once much further inland, as sea levels rose and created the separate islands of the archipelago.
Nornour, a tiny eastern island, reveals the impact of rising sea levels. There are the remains of 11 stone round houses on the island, which were occupied from the Bronze Age to the Romano-British Iron Age. Today the island is just 4 acres in size and would not be able to support such a substantial settlement, suggesting that much of the island has been reclaimed by the sea. Thousands of Roman broaches have been found in the upper layers of two of the buildings, which suggests that the site became a shrine and a place of pilgrimage into the 4th Century.
