Buckingham Palace, one of the sites in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by sml!

The final programme was fairly typical of the whole weekend. The only site that was presented as having moved on a lot was Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace

If the earlier days at the palace has been like the final day then I’d have been won over. There was at last an obvious plan of action where the archaeology was meaningful. Using Ground-Penetrating Radar they were able to locate the position of Arlington House and Goring House, two previous buildings on site. Of more interest to me was what they found in the garden. The strata revealed agricultural use. For somewhere that’s in the centre of modern London that’s interesting. You can ask how did open fields survive to the seventeenth century or flip the question round and ask what processes led urban London to migrate into this area? Either way you have an interesting problem. They concluded the shape of the palace gardens was defined in pat by the medieval field systems that it came to be built upon.

Windsor Castle

The excavation at the Round Table was slow. They have dated the building to the fourteenth century, so it’s the More >