ABSTRACT
Prehistoric archaeology was never intended to be at the heart of the Shapwick Project. Nevertheless, once the decision was taken to collect a sample of all artefacts and ecofacts on the land surface during fieldwalking, a sizeable collection of flint, chert and other stone artefacts was inevitably recovered. On the Shapwick villa site was controlled metal-detecting undertaken across the open fields as part of the operation to recover and record the coin hoard discovered there in 1998. The decision not to include metal-detecting more widely as part of the Shapwick Project was a conscious one and it was taken for several reasons. Fieldwalking provides a generalized impression of the date, scale and location of buried archaeology for most periods of Shapwick's past but it fails when artefact densities are negligible or non-existent. The role of buildings survey in this Project highlights important differences between research at Shapwick and the methods employed by archaeologists designing projects through the planning system.
