Newsletter 43 - Spring 2005

Section editor David Allen

If there is a thread running through the contributions this time round it is the way in which the individual authors identify with their subjects and convey a sense of ownership.

Brian Hack, who has written before on Rainbow Bar for the Newsletter and Hampshire Studies, tells me that 'at 76 years of age', and 'after 30 years of active involvement', he 'is about to call it a day as far as archaeology is concerned'. Time and tide seem to stand in the way of any major work at Rainbow Bar, and Brian feels that the final point worth emphasising is the Continental link.

Robert Garnham is from Chandler's Ford, but now lives in Galveston, Texas. He contributed a piece to the last Newsletter about the ford at Chandler's Ford and follows it up with a bit of special knowledge, and possibly special pleading, about potential food sources near to the Zionshill Iron Age enclosure. It was Robert who located and provisionally surveyed the enclosure. More recent work by Berkshire Archaeological Services (Hampshire Studies, 58, 1-23) included a ditch section, which yielded a wide range of environmental data including evidence for birch, alder, hazel, bracken, broom, grass, heather, bilberry and bluebells. No animal bones were found, due to the acidic nature of the soils, but a fragment of rotary quern was recovered. The Zionshill enclosure dwellers were almost certainly farmers, but they may have been fish-farmers too and Robert gives us food for thought.

John Spaul wrote an earlier piece (Newsletter 31) on the identity of Leucomagus, an authoritative article that stopped me, and several others, from using it as the name for the East Anton Roman crossroads, near Andover. Now he turns his attention to the 'honorific' stone from Clanville and the question of imperial estates. It may interest him to know that Prof Barry Cunliffe has already revisited four of the north-west Hampshire sites, with a fifth (Abbotts Ann) planned for this year; the origins, early or otherwise, of Romano-British occupation at these agricultural centres should soon be known.

Finally Kay Ainsworth has been organising the Archaeology Section Conference for a number of years and always likes to give those who weren't there a chance to read what they missed and those who were the opportunity to enjoy it over again. Many thanks go to Kay and her fellow committee members for organising such an excellent event.

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