This visit offers the opportunity to see two Sussex excavations in progress. In the morning David Rudling, Academic Director of the Sussex School of Archaeology, will take us around Plumpton Roman Villa, a winged corridor house, and tell us about the three years of excavations there. In the afternoon, either Rob Wallace or David Millum, Dig Directors, will guide us around Bridge Farm - a Romano British settlement - where excavations have been in progress since 2013. There will be a pub lunch between the two visits.

Excavations will continue between in June and July 2017 in the field adjacent to Cocks Farm Roman villa. Previous seasons have uncovered intense Iron Age and Roman activity with grain storage pits, IA enclosure ditches, Roman field boundaries, agricultural gullies, the remains of ovens/hearths, IA cremations, Bronze Age and Iron Age ritual activity . If you are interested in joining us please contact Nikki Cowlard at nikki.cowlard@btinternet.com.

'Revolutionary' Ideas: Seeing society in the ceramic technology of the Later Iron Age of Berkshire and Hampshire

Emma Corke, site director of the field excavations at Cocks Farm, Abinger will be talking to us about the latest season of excavation . Magnetometry carried out by the Roman Studies Group showed a mass of features on the hill above the Roman villa site, and excavation has revealed both prehistoric and Roman activity.

Members of RSG will be reporting back both on post-excavtion work relating to Ashtead Roman villa (David Bird), Flexford (David Calow) and Church Meadow Roman settlement site (Nikki Cowlard), and recent fieldwork led by David and Audrey Graham.

Alexis Haslam is a Senior Archaeologist with Pre-Construct Archaeology and has extensive experience of running commercial archaeological sites in London and the South-East. In 2015 he led the investigations on the animal husbandry site at NESCOT in Ewell, which revealed a landscape of Roman chalk quarrying with extensive ritual deposition. Alexis will be taking us behind the scenes of Roman-period commercial excavations in the Historic County of Surrey, including those in Borough High Street in Southwark.

David Staveley is well known to many of us in RSG. He is a computer programmer by day and in his spare time is an archaeological geophysicist studying Roman roads and roadside settlements in Sussex. David has carried out ground penetrating radar at Flexford and has used GPR to identify Stane Street beneath Church Street in Ewell (in conjunction with the Church Meadow Project). He is also the author of Snuffler, freeware geophysics software for earth resistance and magnetometry.

This meeting starts our winter series of lectures which run from October 2016 to March 2017. The dates for these lectures are as follows: 11th October, 8th November, 6th December, 3rd January, 7th February and 7th March.

Please note that the October and November meetings are taking place on the 2nd Tuesday of the month rather than the usual 1st Tuesday.

VISIT TO FISHBOURNE ROMAN PALACE ON 23 JULY