Last updated: 14th June 2008 (R.Tabor)

Since 1994 the project has carried excavations of varying scale at Castle Farm, Crissells Green, Homeground, Milsoms Corner and The Moor, South Cadbury; Sheep Slait, Poyntington; Sigwells, Charlton Horethorne; and Plain of Slait, Woolston.  Three of these areas stand out as being of national or international importance following the project’s work.

Fuller accounts and interpretations of all these excavation appear in Cadbury Castle: The hillfort and Landscapes. Full academic reports will only be possible if funding can be found for analysis and writing for two further volumes.

Geophysical survey has formed the backbone of the project from an early stage. By 1996 it had become part of the project’s strategy that there should be total gradiometry (a form of magnetometry) coverage if all sample areas and that remains the case.

Some of the results have been spectacular because of particular individual features  revealed but of the greatest important has been the revelation of bounded systems of land-use which reach back to the Early Bronze Age. Many illustrations are published in Cadbury Castle: The hillfort and its landscapes. A full analysis and interpretation of the geophysical survey results  appears in The South Cadbury Environs Project, Neolithic to Medieval landscapes. Volume 1: Methods, themes and synthesis.

The excavations of 1m squares down to the geological surface at every 100m within sampled areas was at once the most revolutionary and the most generally informative technique introduced by the project, providing a relatively small but very high quality prehistoric database. The link between test pits and geophysical data was established more firmly by the introduction of pits targetting key geophysical anomalies at the expense of ploughzone sampling. Evaluation and theoretical discussion of this strategy appears in The South Cadbury Environs Project, Neolithic to Medieval landscapes. Volume 1: Methods, themes and synthesis.

At its ad hoc beginning the project was based on fieldwalking. Research into the practices and results of surveys around the world demponstrated that the technique was very unreliable in particular circumstances, notably where soils have moved rapidly , as they have in Britain.  The problems are set out and discussed in Regional Perspectives in Archaeology: from sampling to narrative and in  The South Cadbury Environs Project, Neolithic to Medieval landscapes. Volume 1: Methods, themes and synthesis.

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Current & forthcoming fieldwork fieldwork