SDO9532 - Land to the West of Poundbury Farm, Dorchester, Dorset: Archaeological Excavation.

Wessex Archaeology was commissioned by the Duchy of Cornwall to undertake an archaeological excavation on land to the west of Poundbury Farm, Dorchester, Dorset. The site is roughly centred on NGR 367040 090660 and forms part of the proposed Phase II Poundbury Development. The excavation was required as a condition of planning permission. The presence of archaeological remains on the site had been established through a series of evaluation trenches that were investigated as part of an earlier phase of assessment. The remains comprised a dispersed occupation site that included a possible round-house and pits, probably of late Bronze Age date (c. 1,500-700 BC) and an associated ditched field system. The aims of the excavation were to improve understanding of the possible roundhouse and identify any further evidence of Bronze Age settlement remains and to establish the nature, date, condition and extent of any surviving archaeological features. To this end three trenches totalling 513m2 were excavated. Trench 1 was targeted over the possible round-house and trenches 2 and 3 were placed over pits identified during the evaluation. Trench 1 did not reveal evidence for the round-house that was expected, rather a winding broken gully was found, probably associated with the field systems seen in the area. In Trench 2 no archaeologically significant features were encountered other than the pit excavated in the evaluation phase. Trench 3 produced further evidence of the field systems in the form of a shallow linear ditch. Also present in this trench was a large pit roughly 6m in diameter which contained a quantity of struck flint and a single sherd on Early to Middle Iron Age (700-100 BC) pottery. This was most likely to be a chalk quarry with the extracted material being used to marl (or fertilise) the surrounding field systems. The evidence retrieved from the excavation adds the picture emerging in the area around Dorchester of widespread but dispersed late prehistoric agrarian occupation.