TVAS Reading: Excavations at Trinity College, Oxford
TVAS Reading: Excavations at Trinity College, Oxford
In late 2023 we were asked to evaluate the lawn of Trinity College, Oxford, ahead of a new sustainable heating project in the form of a ground source heat pump. This evaluation stage proved fruitful, and archaeology was encountered across the whole site in nearly all but one of the trenches opened.
Almost a year later in October 2024, we returned to the site to undertake the excavation between the boreholes in 1m wide connecting trenches. Following on from the results of the evaluation stage, the site showed a wide range of use, from the beginnings of the Medieval period right up until the modern day.
In the south of site towards Parks Road, an untouched area of Medieval activity was uncovered. The extremely dense archaeological activity came mainly in the form of rubbish pits, although a few postholes and linears were also observed. The difficulty of a 1m wide excavation area means that no clear shape can be made from the postholes, but it is the hope that any future excavations could change this. The rubbish pits produced vast amounts of pottery and animal bone, alongside personal items such as book clasps and even a Medieval finger ring! A re-cut ditch seems to delaminate the area of untouched Medieval pitting towards the road from the post-Medieval activity towards the college, and might represent an old boundary of the college.
To the west and towards the college itself, the excavation uncovered a wealth of post-Medieval archaeology. A plethora of artefacts belonging to the post-Medieval life of the college have been recovered from rubbish pits, which made up the majority of the features on site. Most of these artefacts came in the form of food waste (animal bones, oysters and other sea food waste etc), broken ceramics and glass vessels, and building materials. In addition, lots of recognisable personal items were also uncovered, such as book clasps, horse spurs, keys and even a toothbrush!
The discovery of several foreign ceramic vessels shows the status of the site and possibly even the lives of foreign students. One of the most frequent of these ceramics were Bartmann jugs (aka. Bellarmine jug or Frechen-Wares), which sport bearded faces and decorative crests – Bartmann is German for “bearded man”. All of these items give us a sense of the social history of the college.
A unique aspect of this project was ‘garden archaeology’, where one of the aims was to find any evidence of changes to the garden over time, especially in relation to the ‘Dutch-style gardens’ depicted in the 1730’s. All three of the garden paths depicted in this drawing were uncovered within the excavation trenches, along with the full width of the remaining central path, which would have been ~6.5m wide in its day. Along one of these paths, foundations for a wall was present, which matches up with the aforementioned drawing of the 18th century gardens.
Despite the narrow trenches, the middle of the site showed increasingly wider and deeper pits, which have been currently theorised as quarrying pits for the underlying deposits of sand and gravel below.
No graves were uncovered across the site; however, a single human jaw was found within a post-Medieval rubbish pit. It is possible that these remains were disturbed from digging the pit itself, or were discarded after use in the college for possible medical practices or part of a reference collection.
The excavations have now concluded, and the post-excavation phase has begun. We are looking forward to what information our specialists can tell us from the assemblage collected, giving us a better idea of the use of the garden over time, and into the lives of the people who attended the college across its lifetime
