Aerial Reconnaissance and Excavation at Littleborough-on-Trent, Notts

Abstract

Littleborough lies on the west bank of the river Trent between Newark and Gainsborough, at the point where the Roman road from Lincoln to Doncaster crossed the river. Finds of Roman material from the site are recorded from the sixteenth century onwards and Roman tile occurs built into the small Norman church. Epigraphic and literary evidence combine to identify the site with Segelocvm, the place name apparently referring to a pool with rapid current in the river. The present paper brings together a considerable amount of new evidence from aerial photographs by J.K. St Joseph and D.N. Riley and the results of excavations by W.B. Clark in 1954–56 and by J.S. Wade in 1968–70. The combined data suggest a substantial defended settlement lying to the north of the present road from Sturton-le-Steeple to the river bank.

The impact of climate change on archaeological resources in Britain: a catchment scale assessment

“…The most obvious and direct threat to archaeological remains are through the traditional, 'hard' engineering approaches to flood risk management, including the building and raising of embankment leveés, channel realignment, engineering and dredging; the latter technique may also be increasingly used to clear weeds from the channel, which are likely to grow more vigorously in response to a warmer climate (Arnell 1998). All these approaches have the potential to destroy archaeology immediately adjacent to and within the channel corridor including major settlements, smaller structures such as wooden platforms and causeways, artefacts such as metalwork and human remains (Bradley and Gordon 1988;Haughey 2003;Phillips 1941;Riley et al 1995;Scurfield 1997). The potential of encountering riverside archaeology is amply illustrated by flood alleviation works undertaken along the Witham Valley, Lincolnshire (Field et al 2003), where the implementation of appropriate mitigation strategies (Usborne 2003) allowed the identification and excavation of a prehistoric wooden causeway.…”

The contribution of geoarchaeology to understanding the environmental history and archaeological resources of the Trent Valley, U.K.

“…Beginning in the early historic period, there is evidence in the LTV of a change in the style and rate of valley-floor alluviation, from organic-rich silts and clays to inorganic red-brown silty clays. This change was initially noted at a number of archaeological sites in the region, including Sandtoft on the banks of the River Idle (Samuels and Buckland, 1978) and Littleborough (Figure 2; Riley et al, 1995), adjacent to the Trent. In both cases, the inorganic silty clays buried Romano-British archaeology.…”

The contribution of a multiproxy approach in reconstructing floodplain development

“…Alternatively, a more recent, postforest clearance, environmental change may be responsible (Buckland & Sadler 1985). A lithologically similar unit seals a series of Roman sites on the lower Trent floodplain, including that 3 km upstream at Littleborough (Riley et al 1995), and elsewhere in the Humberhead Levels (Buckland & Sadler 1985;Dinnin 1997b). It seems reasonable to suggest that the deposit at Bole Ings is coeval with that at Littleborough.…”

“…Knight & Howard (1994) and Lillie & Grattan (1994) inter alia questioned both the timing and anthropogenic role in the proposed phase of enhanced flooding. In many of the peri-estuarine floodplains of the region the uppermost sedimentary unit comprises a metre or more of reddish oxidized fine-grained alluvium (Buckland & Sadler 1985;Riley et al 1995;Dinnin 1997b, c). Buckland & Sadler (1985) attributed this change in overbank sedimentation to accelerated soil erosion resulting from agricultural developments during the late Roman period.…”