Well well well. I discovered an astonishing artefact yesterday. In theory it could date to as early as the early aceramic phase A (circa 6,900 - 6000 Before the Christian Era) but is more likely to be at most only around 6,000 years old with my most conservative estimate being to around 3,000 years old. It is fascinating I walked into a bakery last night "on autopilot" gazing at it (I was supposed to be heading back to the adjacent pub). Perhaps only one in a thousand finds will be an arrowhead and this is what I found. As the other members of the team used diggers and cameras, I was down on my hands and knees in the mud scraping the trench through and with my mucky hands looking through the spoil heaps.
I gave all prior finds to the site proprietor and it was only by sheer fortune that towards the end of the day's work I happened upon this marvellous artefact which now takes pride of place in my emerging collection.
Evidence for the piece being estimated in its chronology to a somewhat earlier date is a second interesting find of what appears to be a gaming piece for an unknown board game played by early man, discovered not far from the arrowhead. The two pieces are precisely the same size (which I believe to be coincidence, as they are unrelated except in context) with the former fitting snugly on to the diamond shaped rock. Several pieces of what upon first glance seemed to be tiles of some sort were found in two separate places near to the second trench (both trenches were 6 feet wide, roughly three yards long and around half a foot deep). It is my opinion that these are merely compressed sections of natural rock which happened to have become fragmented by chance into rectangular shapes, one of which being a diamond. This is based on another find at the site of a larger chunk of stone bearing a step-like example of several layers of the clay making an evenly spaced stratigraphic unit, with regularity and uniform. So it is unlikely to have been fragments of a tessellated building of some kind, what appeared at first to be a mosaic, are all in-fact completely natural. However, my colleague errs more to see the diamond as a gaming piece and the flint I found he assesses with more caution, believing it not to be an arrowhead.
In any case, we were both able to identify a piece of pottery I discovered upon my first searching to the spoil heap after being instructed to by my boss. It was a great feeling actually. Thirty seconds or so in this perfectly white object, excepting with tiny blue transferred on crosses with four little dots in-between the spokes on its pattern. With hardly a trace of the surrounding soil, exhuming that upon the first search (one most often finds nothing without having a survey or prior research literature duly noted) seeing it glimmer in the morning sunshine, holding it aloft then being told: likely only late seventeenth century to perhaps the eighteenth. I don't know if any of you reading this have ever put your hand in to a load of moist soil and pull out a piece of pottery some centuries old, but it's a really nice feeling, despite mud being everywhere. The arrowhead blew my mind.
I was going to call the piece the "Keinton Mandeville arrowhead" but I have decided to name it "The Maiden of Keinton Mandeville" after the poem by Thomas Hardy. This will make it harder to search for on the web, but I don't care.
It is almost tempting to conjure an image in one's mind of an ancient cave-woman wielding it, her husband having been trampled by a woolly mammoth in ancient Somerset somewhere around 4,500 B.C.E. The Maiden of Keinton Mandeville.
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