Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project

Poster for the course booking. The season is between the 12th of July to the 7th of August, with excavation and human remains courses now available to be booked. More courses will also be advertised soon.

The bookings for the 2026 season are now open!

The 2026 season will be a special one for us as we will be celebrating our 30th anniversary, so there has never been a better time to join us!

Just visit www.sharp.org.uk for more details!

View toward a lecture screen. The title is 'Life was not all Beer & Skittles', with an image of skittles and balls with a stylised skeleton drawing falling over.

Another fascinating talk this week from Ray Baldry on the work of our volunteers in assessing the palaeopathology of the population excavated by us at Sedgeford.

A row of archaeologisys work backwards, carefully trowelling to clean up the loose.

Gareth stands at the lecturn speaking about the content of our new book.

A nearly full moon shines brightly over the fields and trees.

A rusty six inch nail sits on top of historic backfill.

Tuesday night was the lecture in the Sedgeford church, and a moonlit trip home from the village pub afterwards....

Today was mostly spent cleaning Trench 25 prior to a drone shot to help plan out the work for the coming weeks, but we did get to dig out a trench from 2007 and found this 6 inch nail!

A bone pin in a finds bag. It has a cylindrical head which is bulbous, narrowing to a neck from which a long thin spine forms the main body of the pin.

A smiling girl sits in the trench holding out the pin she has just found.

Two people stand next to a tripod, on which a bright orange dumpy level sits. They are laughing at the fact that it isn't getting level at all.

Matilda, one of our BERTs, even found this lovely bone pin!

This beat out our volunteers by some way, as they'd spent the day rechecking our TBMs across site to refresh their skills.

The 'Dig for the Days' working hard on finding early medieval artefacts from a thick layer of hill wash.

The BERTs' sondage, with a large bone just under the surface.

We had 'Dig for the Days' on Tuesday, who excavated sondages through a colluvial deposit which contained Saxon pottery, bone and oystershell.

We also have BERTs (Basic Excavation & Recording Techniques) who started their own sondage into a different colluvium and found large animal bone.

A small sherd of Samien pottery, woth decorated incisions and grooves, as well part of the main decorated scene.

The sun shines down on a group of archaeologists working hard to tidy up Trench 25.

Daub fragments laid out on a table. The fragments have the remnants of the wattle which had been woven to create a frame.

Monday saw us hiding from the rain in the morning, but by the afternoon we were all out cleaning the trenches and started finding things, including this lovely piece of Samien ware, dating to the mid 1st C.

Our daub project was also in full swing, assessing our collection for 3d scanning next week.

Detail of the Sedgeford Hoard. Many many gold coins dating to the Iron Age are arranged next to the broken end of a cow bone, which they had been put inside.

Large central stump from the Sea Henge monument. It is upside down, with the root bole protruding outwards.

Arrangement of timbers from Sea Henge, in a big circle. They are roughly a metre high.

Mid week update!

Sunday proved very wet, and thunderstorms threatened, so we managed to open up Trench 24 and clean Trench 25 after machining it last week. The rest hid and cleaned the last of the daub from last year, whilst others voyaged into King's Lynn to see put hoard and Sea Henge on display.

Gareth stands at the lecturn in a church, in front of a slide showing the front and back covers of the book.

Thanks to @drgarethdavies.bsky.social for launching our book of our conference the Anglo-Saxon Agricultural Revolution in. Norfolk.

You can buy the book at the link below, but it is also available open access as an ebook.

www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress... www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress...

A group of volunteers stand rapt in attention as Lucy examines some charred bone recovered from a deposit.

Impromptu talk by @lucyjkoster.bsky.social on determining animal versus human bone on trench, following up on yesterday's training our volunteers had with our reference collection.

Screenshot of an Instagram story. The camera looks out over a trench with a hive of activity hoeing and toweling to bring up features. A caption above in the beautiful blue sky says 'sun's out, trowels out'

After a rainy few days, we're finally getting into the nitty gritty and delving into the silty sand.

A tiny fragment of highly decorated Romanpottery held out by a yellow glove. The sherd is bright red, and has a row of ridges and grooves with the partial remnants of a decorated scene visible, but as it is barely 2cm wide not much can be identified.

We've reopened Trench 25 from last year and already have a contender for find of the week with this lovely bit of Samien found by Alison!

George, our anatomical model skeleton, is stood in at the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Sedgeford where human remains is based. He appears to be shrugging with his right arm. Some of our admin tables are visible behind him. He is excited for the wonderful osteology we will get to record this year.

Taking a couple of weeks away from @brusselsbioarch.bsky.social for fieldwork at @sedgefordarch.bsky.social in Norfolk! Our human remains volunteers have made an excellent start so far and I will be spamming updates as we go 😊💀💀

A museum display is visible. A board of text is present on the left with the detail of the hoard, dated to the Iron Age. 32 Gallo-Belgic gold 'E' starters were hidden in a cow bone, which was found at Sedgeford. The bone is displayed with a selection of the coins to the right of the label. The bone is not complete, with only one end present and the long section clearly broken.

A few of us took the opportunity given the wet weather today (sadly on our first day of the season) to see the hoard found during our previous excavations on display at Lynn Museum.

A museum display is visible. A board of text is present on the left with the detail of the hoard, dated to the Iron Age. 32 Gallo-Belgic gold 'E' starters were hidden in a cow bone, which was found at Sedgeford. The bone is displayed with a selection of the coins to the right of the label. The bone is not complete, with only one end present and the long section clearly broken.

A few of us took the opportunity given the wet weather today (sadly on our first day of the season) to see the hoard found during our previous excavations on display at Lynn Museum.

Trench 25: the car park trench WARNING: the following article contains images and text related to human remainsLast year, we opened a new trench in the carpark, Trench 25, which contained far more than we had bargained for. In this...

Check out our latest blog post to find out what we found in our new Car Park Trench last season, and our plans for this excavation this coming season which is now just around the corner!
WARNING: the following article contains images and text related to human remains.

What's the 'best' thing you've ever found is always a tricky one but my thoughts always go back to the butchered whale bone (that's a bit of vertebrae I'm holding) from an early medieval pit at Sedgford. Also, the first feature I ever dug! @sedgefordarch.bsky.social

Our open day/archaeology festival is on the 20th of July, but you're welcome any time, Sunday to Friday.

You're more than welcome to down come and see what we're up to.

There has been some discussion about doing a survey to see where everyone's ended up after coming dig here. It's our 30th anniversary next year, so it'd be nice to get some idea of how successful the BERT programme has been.

We might not have as clear features as @durotrigesdig.bsky.social (orangish brown sandy silt cut into brownish orange silty sand never shows up well on camera), but we definitely have some good archaeology!

Dust jacket of 'The Anglo-Saxon Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk', edited by Richard Hogget and Neil Faulkner. The front page shows a drone shot of our early medieval complex trench, with the modern village of Sedgeford in the background. The back page contains a photo of a complete pot, with the blurb discussing the contributions made in the book towards the topic.

SHARP is pleased to announce that our publication 'The Anglo-Saxon Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk' based on the 25th Anniversary conference held in 2020 is off to the printers!

We are aiming for a book launch on the first Tuesday lecture, and it will be available to purchase during the season.

It will have a RRP of £40 and will be sold during the season in our shop on site, but a free online publication will be made available later.

To gauge interest in physical copies so that we can print to meet demand, or just to get more information about its contents, please follow the link below.

Dust jacket of 'The Anglo-Saxon Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk', edited by Richard Hogget and Neil Faulkner. The front page shows a drone shot of our early medieval complex trench, with the modern village of Sedgeford in the background. The back page contains a photo of a complete pot, with the blurb discussing the contributions made in the book towards the topic.

SHARP is pleased to announce that our publication 'The Anglo-Saxon Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk' based on the 25th Anniversary conference held in 2020 is off to the printers!

We are aiming for a book launch on the first Tuesday lecture, and it will be available to purchase during the season.

EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY | SHARP

Here's a link to our course page, should anyone there be interested in having a go over with us.
For myself, I've enjoyed making glass beads, but we don't (yet) have the capacity to do that here. A few years back I did take part in attempting to smelt copper ore, which was definitely hard work.

We do think Dobbin is one of the cutest of our finds!

We run a course on ancient crafting techniques, which while not aimed at making precise replicas, is about the art of learning how past people did make their objects. Some have been gone on to take those techniques up as a hobby, and we look forward to seeing their skills developing.

We are in the process of making a more transparent research protocol, which will aid the accessibility of our archive to a wider range of researchers beyond the SHARP team, and this could include potential makers. Look out for a future page on the website coming soon.

We even have a site museum and shop, where we would be more than happy to use replicas during our public engagement if they were donated to us, or we are always on the lookout for new merchandise so could sell them for the artist with an agreed small commission for SHARP.

While we don’t have a dodecahedron, but we do have a wonderful assortment of unique objects that people are welcome to replicate. All we ask of anyone replicating objects is that they make it clear it’s a replica, and if they are sold, that SHARP is credited so people know where it was found.

The original creators died a long time ago, and we do not inherit their copyright because we found that object in the ground.
Sharing photos is vital to education and public engagement, and technology like 3D printers and the increase in replicating ancient crafts ate both valuable ways to do that.

We feel there is no exclusive rights to the reproduction of objects that we have excavated, and our photos in the public domain (on social media or website) are free to be used by anyone if unaltered and with acknowledgement of SHARP.