430 Oliver's Camp, Devizes. 



important a bearing upon the history of the camp to allow it to 

 remain in any doubt, and for this reason it was thought necessary 

 to cut other sections through the rampart at " B " and " D." In 

 neither of these latter sections was there any appearance of de- 

 cayed turf or mould except on the old surface, and it appeared 

 quite clear that the building had been done with regularity all at 

 one time. 



It is not difficult to account for the occasional presence of seams 

 of turf and mould in the body of ramparts which are obviously 

 composed of material excavated out of the ditches. General Pitt- 

 Rivers noted similar seams of dark mould in the sections that he 

 cut through the Wansdyke. He says of them " the dark seam 

 appeared to have been caused either by heaping up turf cut from 

 the ditch or by deposit of surface mould thrown up undesignedly 

 during the original construction of the rampart." ^ He goes on to 

 say that pottery and other relics are almost invariably found in 

 the dark seams, and suggests that it is because they were acci- 

 dentally picked up with the surface material in which they were 

 already contained. 



An interesting discovery was that of an ancient hearth site almost 

 directly under the apex of the rampart, in and partly below the 

 line of the old soil. The hearth consisted of a roughly circular 

 hole 18in. in diameter, which had been scooped out through the 

 old turf down into the chalk beneath to a depth of Sin. It had 

 evidently been the site of many fires, and was still full of charcoal 

 amongst which were three small sherds of coarse red pottery, some 

 charred bone, the core of a horn, probably that of an ox, and 

 fragments of teeth. One flint flake was actually in the hearth, 

 and several flakes and rough pieces of flint were scattered in the 

 soil round it. The pottery is of Bronze Age type. 



A small piece of Samian ware no larger than a sixpenny piece 

 and a guinea weight were the only relics found in the body 

 of the rampart. The Samian was lift, below the sui-face at 

 the crest, and the guinea weight was immediately below the 



' Vol. III., p. 252. 



