Principal Christine Shaw
This is another long term programme with international equivalents which still involve Butser personnel. The present status is that all the UK based earthworks are quiescent i.e. they exist in the field but are now subject only to occasional semi-quantitative record of a modified type. Consideration of use by outside academics, such as at Reading University, has emerged. Also, an emergency final record may have to be made of one earthworks, whose existence is likely to end as a result of a need for reuse of the site.
This study focuses on the behaviour of domestic scale ditch and bank constructs from the time of the initial construction. The earliest study used a construct based broadly on existing excavation data and from the understanding gained about the response to weather, plant colonisation and interference, the current octagonal layout of ditch and bank was devised, so as to determine the effect of as many constructional variables as was practicable.
The octagonal layout gives maximum coverage of the effect of orientation to the prevailing weather. The bank construction is varied to study the effect of building it with or without a berm, between it and the ditch, and to test the interaction of this variable with initial turf coverage or not.
As well as the weather records (Weather Station), progress towards stabilisation of the system was followed by annual recording, in July, of the nature and degree of revegetation, including periodic measurement of the physical profile of the ditch, where resources allow. Photographic and, occasionally, video records are also made. This continued for 15 years up to Reynolds' death and now the reduced monitoring mentioned above is applied.
The studies were sustained by a study group, which is no longer in existence, though one or two of the original principals are available to carry out the reduced monitoring and such rescue work as is referred to above.
A number of such earthworks have been built on a variety of rock/soil types, both in the UK and abroad. An appreciation of the early stages of recording the behaviour of a linear construct, as opposed to the preferred octagonal type, has been reported in Monografies D'Arqueilogia Medieval I Postmedieval No 3, University of Barcelona, 1998.
These studies are complementary to those on the major experimental earthworks at Overton, Wareham Down and Morden Bog in the UK.
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Created 01 August 2001 - Updated 14 March 2006