ABSTRACT
To the south of Shapwick Park mansion, lie over five hectares of pasture and meadow dotted with mature parkland trees. From early on in the life of the Project, the team were using late-18th-century maps to suggest a chronology for the embankment of the medieval and later village. Aerial photographs taken in the dry spring of 1990 had confirmed the lines of earlier streets and awareness of the archaeological potential of the area was heightened after excavation by Somerset County Council in response to a planning application on the proposed site of the Shapwick School Sports Hall. A very similar example was found close by during work on the Polden pipeline, together with five other cores, an earlier to middle Neolithic borer, the only example of such a prehistoric piercing tool from Shapwick excavations, two flakes and a core rejuvenation flake.
