ARACHAEOLOGY volunteers have uncovered a 2,000-year-old farm, as well as evidence of earlier settlements, on land at Colemore, between Alton and Petersfield.

The Liss Archaeology group has just completed a four-week dig in a field near Colemore, seven miles south of Alton, and the finds have continued to confirm that there was a large Roman building there between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. There is also evidence of Iron Age and Bronze Age occupation nearby.

Liss Archaeology, so named because its first investigation in 2004 was the uncovering of a Roman villa in West Liss, when the new A3 was built, has about 70 members from all over Hampshire who volunteer their time to do research, geophysics scans, excavations and identifications of finds under the supervision of professional archaeologists. Some volunteers travel from as far as Australia and the United States, and in the UK from London and Birmingham, to take part in the digs but many volunteers are from Alton and Four Marks.

The excavation near Colemore takes place twice a year, in April/May and September/October, for a month at a time, and started in 2009. In previous years, the foundations have been found of a large Romano-British building, probably a farmhouse, enclosed by a rectangular ditch about 80 metres by 90 metres in size and up to two metres deep in places. It is assumed that this ditch was to keep in livestock and keep out wild animals. In part of the building was one large square room which was found to be the kitchen. In one corner, the oven made of brick and tile was found intact and inside the oven was the remains of the occupant’s meal – a complete cooking bowl containing animal bones. The thickness of the walls at nearly one metre suggests that the building was at least two storeys high.

The site is popular with children from local primary schools, who come to see the digs as part of their study of the Romans. During school visits in May this year, the group hosted children from Ropley and Selborne who watched the excavations but also learned how to use metal detectors, how to carefully wash pottery finds and how to piece together broken pots.

Decisions on where to excavate on the site are made by Juliet Smith, the archaeology director, from underground scans made using geophysics equipment similar to that once seen on Time Team; Liss Archaeology uses resistivity and magnetometry equipment which plots maps showing where there were once walls, ditches and evidence of iron-making on the site. The group also uses sophisticated computer mapping and drone imagery to record the site.

Excavating the deep enclosure ditch is especially useful because the occupants used the ditches for discarding their rubbish such as broken pottery, glass, iron objects and animal bones, and these help to date the site. There are also large quantities of building material such as Roman roof tiles, wall plaster, tesserae from crude mosaic floors, and hypocaust tiles from heated walls.

The evidence to date suggests that during the 400 years of Roman occupation the owners must have been reasonably well off, because some of the glass objects found came from as far away as the country now known as Germany.

While most of the pottery came from the Alice Holt kilns, other pieces were Samian ware from Gaul and ornate and often-decorated pots from kilns in the New Forest, Oxfordshire and the Nene Valley near Peterborough.

Liss Archaeology’s next exploration will be in July, when the group will re-visit the village of Stroud, near Petersfield, for the second year of the Stroud Big Dig, to coincide with the British Festival of Archaeology. Last year, residents allowed the digging of 21 test pits in their gardens near the Roman villa found there in 1906. These test pits provided finds evidence of other Romano-British items some distance from the villa, suggesting the possibility of other buildings not yet discovered.

n For more details about the group and its activities, visit lissarchaeology.uk.