The geophys season has started again, and here are the first batch of results. For some strange reason, I took a week off of work to do this survey. It must be some sort of winter induced madness. I've done a lot of surveying at Barcombe, and this time it is on the site of the Roman villa itself. The villa has already been excavated over the course of many years, but I wanted to see if there was anything else that had been missed, especially as there was an adjacent bath house and Roman road. My thanks go to members of MSFAT for helping out with this survey. Click on the image to see a bigger version.
To get you oriented on what is where, the Roman road runs broadly along where the green line is to the east, and the villa is to the west, with the bath house being in the field to the north, which you can see under excavation on the image. The most obvious features on the results are unfortunately rubbish. The zebra like line is a metal pipe, and the dark blobs are most likely geological. There are a couple of old field boundaries near the centre of the image showing as dark lines, with a paleo-channel in the north east, where the current stream that flows between the fields used to cross directly through the field. Most of the ditches that you can see in the north-west are already known about from the excavations, though there are a few on the periphery which were not excavated. It seems that the original excavation took in most of what was available archaeologically, and there is not additional occupation associated with the villa, bath-house and road, at least in this field.
This survey also shows how magnetometry and resistivity complement each other. The above survey shows the ditches only, whereas the resistivity only shows the walls, as you can see below.
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