Animal Husbandry Land NESCOT Reigate Road Ewell Surrey

Between 27th May and 2nd July 2014 Oxford Archaeology carried out a 5% evaluation of a 5.5ha area at the North East Surrey College of Art and Technology
Animal Husbandry Land for Scott Brownrigg on behalf of the college.

A buried soil covering at least 40m square was found on the west side of the site,
and this contained a mixture of struck flints of two period, the Mesolithic (8000-4000
BC) and the Bronze Age (2500-800 BC). The flints recovered from the 1m test-pits
that were dug suggested a density of 6-8 struck flints per m2, indicating that a
considerable assemblage could lie buried in this part of the site. The concentration
of flints was not however sufficient to indicate that the flints were in situ, and the
presence of flints of two dates in the same layer suggested that this may have been
a colluvial layer containing material derived from further upslope.
A small pit found some 120m further east contained a few struck flints, and may also
have been of earlier prehistoric date.
Two gullies in the north-west corner of the site contained sherds of pottery of late
Bronze Age or early Iron Age date (1000-600BC), together with struck flints of
broadly contemporary character. An unexcavated gully found in a third, adjacent,
trench may have been a continuation, or a return, of one of the two ditches.over 7m across and 3.2m deep had been dug into the natural. The sides and base
of this were irregular, but at the base of the deepest part a sherd of late Bronze Age
or early Iron Age pottery was found, overlain by the crouched burial of an adult
male. The skeleton was partly disarticulated, but was almost complete. No other
finds were recovered from the fills of the feature, except for a few fragments of
further adult human bone, from a different individual, in the very top.
East of this prehistoric activity a group of other quarry pits or shafts was found, and
one more on the south edge of the site. A hand-excavated slot was dug into one of
the group, and showed that it was at least 10m across and 2.2m deep, with a very
irregular profile. The fills contained Roman finds, including the burial of several
neonatal infants, and two largely complete pots, which date the infilling between
AD100 and 250. The animal bones were mostly of dog, pig and horse, unlike
domestic sites, where most bones are of cattle and sheep, and support the view that
this was not simply used as a rubbish dump, but was filled with carefully selected
material. The other quarry pits were only tested by machine, and only one was
bottomed. Roman shafts are particularly characteristic of Ewell, having been found
just over the A24 in the 19th century, at Hatch Furlong to the NW between 2006 and
2009, and in the playing fields of NESCOT to the south-east in the 1940s, but
quarries containing such deposits are more unusual.
In the late Roman period a ditch was dug across the very north edge of the site, and
this contained domestic rubbish. It was aligned north-west to south-east, and was
probably following the line of a late Roman road on the same alignment, found next
to the Cheam Road at Hatch Furlong just to the north