EWX2379 - 26 East Street, Wareham; excavation 1977

Poole Museums Service conducted a small excavation over a weekend in January 1979 on the south side of East Street, on the east corner of its junction with Church Street. After the demolition of two 19th-century houses a 3m by 2m L-shaped trench was dug both arms ending at the street frontage. Concrete foundations made it impossible to maintain the complete trench, but some 30cm below the Victorian foundations a fine black humus was encountered. This layer was approximately 40cm thick, and contained medieval pottery of 12th to 14th-century date. Below this layer archaeological features - two slots and four stake holes - were found, cut into a re-deposited yellow sandy layer dumped onto a layer of black soil 2-8cm thick, over natural sand. All features and layers contained exclusively medieval pottery. The excavators regarded the only significant feature to be a north-south gully encountered below the black humus and the yellow sandy layer. They noted that the feature sloped 'quite markedly' southwards, and that it was about 1.3m wide at the top, with its east side being 6.3m from the edge of Church Street. A second trench a 5m by 2m rectangle was excavated at the south end of the tenement, it revealed only natural sand.