South Cadbury - SCEP
The South Cadbury Environs Project (SCEP) was originally started in the early 1990s by Richard Tabor to look at the area immediately around South Cadbury hillfort. It was intended to put the Iron Age hillfort and the earlier and later archaeology on the hill in some kind of context, prompted by the publication of the late 1960s excavations carried out by Leslie Alcock. Very little archaeology had been identified in the area from earthworks and aerial photography.
Richard devised a programme of looking at the wider landscape using a variety of techniques, but based primarily on geophysical survey using a gradiometer, plough zone sampling and test pits. In some cases findings were then followed up with larger excavations, providing many exciting and unique landscape features, including rare Early Neolithic pits, a late Bronze Age ringwork, one of the earliest in situ metalworking sites in Britain and at least one unusual scatter of around 5000 Iron Age pits. We now know that much of the landscape was heavily utilised from the Neolithic onwards, including important early landscape divisions and fields.
The project has benefited in the past from generous grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which was able to fund Richard’s employment as Project Director. That has now come to an end. However, the workforce has always relied on a wide variety of volunteers and students carrying out placements. Following the end of the project’s grant funding, SCEP continues on an entirely volunteer basis, under the aegis of SSARG. We continue to ‘fill in the blanks’ where possible in the SCEP study area, mainly with geophysical survey, but also utilising earthwork survey and occasional test pits. The main task at hand is continuing analysis, writing up for final publication and preparation of the project archives for long term storage.
SCEP's website is maintained by Richard Tabor and gives much more detail of the work carried out until 2008. This website will be developed to contain information on the work since the formation of the SCEPVA in 2008 and its subsequent amalgamation into SSARG.