Once again, we’ve enjoyed a very successful year, with members participating in lectures, visits and
various other activities.
Our lecture programme has seen us moving in and out of the Roman period, beginning last
September with Stuart Orme telling us about medicine and surgery in the Roman empire, Derek
Roberts giving us an update on our excavations at the Roman farmstead at Nassington in January,
and, in March, David Ingham considering whether Roman Bedfordshire was an Imperial Estate or the
back of beyond. In between these, we moved forwards almost 2000 years for our October lecture
when Dr Paul Stamper looked at the changes to the countryside in the Napoleonic era. In February,
Dr Sarah Botfield took us back further in time, giving us a fascinating insight into the decoration of
prehistoric pottery and we will round off this year’s lecture programme with Dr Adam Sutton who is
going to talk about Iron Age pottery at the end of this AGM.
We have held several sessions of finds processing and all the finds from our excavations at Barnwell
and Nassington are washed, sorted, weighed and counted and ready to be looked at by finds
specialists. And we are very grateful to all our members who have come and helped us to achieve
this.
We also had our first foray into fieldwalking for many years with a very successful and fun day at
Great Gidding in March, in spite of it being bitterly cold. We are hoping to return to the field to do
some more in the autumn. So do watch out for details.
At the end of June, we visited the excavations at Chester House, which included a workshop on
Roman pottery with Adam and a tour of the county’s archaeological resource centre. And in August,
we returned to Nassington to hold our own excavation. Due to the wet summer, we had to postpone
the start by several days, and also change the location of where we dug. However, this gave us the
opportunity to look at some earlier activity, with features from the late Iron Age/early Roman period
being explored. Though we were only able to dig for 9 days rather than our usual 15, we still
managed to complete all that we set out to do.
Finally, I and the MidNAG committee would like to thank all of you for coming to lectures, trudging
over fields, counting pottery sherds and digging in muddy trenches. We couldn’t do it without you
and we really hope you’ve enjoyed whatever activities you’ve been involved with and that you will
come back and do it all again with us in the 2025 -26 season.