SDO12248 - Fontmell Down, Dorset. Land-use, landscape, and land management; the land snail evidence.

Wessex Archaeology conducted a land snail analysis on Fontmell Down consisting of six samples taken from the shallow cross-ridge dyke ditch exposed in a water pipe trench. The ditch fill consisted of a primary of chalk rubble (layer 6), with bank wash on the south-west (layer 5a), and a secondary fill of loose silty clay (layer 5b). Then came a weakly developed stabilisation horizon sealing the buried soils (layer 4). This was in turn sealed by tertiary deposits. Samples were taken from each of these layers, each one of between 1300g and 2000g due to worries that the weakly cancerous samples may not contain many shells. Sells numbers in the end were high, averaging nearly 250 shells per kilogram. Only the stabilisation layer (layer 4) and sample 5a from the backwash, contained significantly fewer. Overall the assemblages are dominated by open country species, though there are a number of shade loving species at the base of the ditch. The report states that the primary fills indicate the presence of a former woodland, but the ditch was built in recently cleared woodland in a grassland or shrubby environment. Within 30 years of the construction of the ditch, open and probably grazed grassland is dominant. Here the grazed grassland probably existed over a shallow, ephemeral ditch.