Techniques, at Stainton West, used to remove coppice stems, sometimes used for the manufacture of stakes, included a combination of cutting, tearing, and cross-cutting.

Several chunks of coppice stool in the assemblage possibly provide evidence of the bowl manufacture. Certain other pieces form debris associated with tree felling, involving a technique where parallel grooves were cut into the trunk, with the wood in between then prised out tangentially. This is the first clear evidence that such a method was used in this country.

Two wooden tridents or forks and what may have been the haft of a paddle (the blade was missing), were placed along the northern edge of the stream that would have flowed there at the time when the wooden platform was constructed. Indeed these wooden objects may have been foundation elements, placed early in the construction of the platform. Radiocarbon assay of the sapwood surviving at the outer edges of the tridents has produced disparate and, slightly puzzling results of and, which nether the less demonstrate that they are of Neolithic origin.

The function of the tridents/forks is not known. Both had broken in antiquity, with, the apparently older, one missing two of its tines and the other being deposited with a tine, which had broken from it, tucked beneath it. In general, their shape resembles that of a modern culinary fork, with three parallel, straight-sided tines, but above the tines there is a well-marked ‘step’, the purpose of which is not obvious.

Both objects have been finely carved, using stone tools, from single pieces of oak heartwood. They are over 2m long, with hafts tapering to points, and the carefully-chamfered tines show no sign of use wear. The trees selected from which to carve the objects were mature specimens, which, if comparable to similar oaks recovered from the palaeochannel, would have been hundreds of years old. In the nineteenth century, comparable objects were found elsewhere, with two being recovered from Ehenside Tarn, in western Cumbria, and another two being found in a peat bog in Co Armargh, Northern Ireland, although no similar finds have been recovered by modern archaeological methods.

The paddle haft revealed and cleaned, before lifting.

Ideally, each lithic item would have been recovered individually and its three-dimensional location logged, to enable a total reconstruction of the site in the archaeological record. It was soon appreciated, however, that this was not a practicable approach. A compromise was arrived at which was considered practically achievable, justifiable and, in the circumstances, provided an optimal information return. The extent of the lithic scatter within the site was subdivided into a grid of one metre squares, numbering 820, in total. The deposit within each square was collected by context (stratigraphic unit), in its entirety. Excavation ceased if an archaeological feature was encountered – in this case the feature was excavated in trowel spits and any finds three-dimensionally recorded. Once the deposit within a grid square had been sampled, it was wet sieved to separate the coarse component >2mm, including any lithic tools, from the clay-silt matrix.

In the event, this involved sieving approximately 270,000 litres of sediment from 3159 individual contexts – which is slightly more material than the upper range of that originally projected.

There was no off-the-peg system, in use within British archaeology, that was capable of efficiently sieving this volume of material, to such a fine grade, especially when the cohesive nature of the parent sediment was factored in. Instead, a system, pioneered in the Netherlands by a Dutch archaeological practise (Archeologisch Diensten Centrum; https://www.archeologie.nl/), was imported and successfully employed. This involved using pumps and water management to cycle the groundwater that inundated the deeper parts of the excavation and use it to wash the samples through an on-site sieving plant. In this manor, the sieving, which geared up to a maximum capacity of four archaeologists, 16 sieves, four high-pressure pumps and two steel-lined sumps was able to keep pace with the excavation team as they sampled the grid squares, using a pool of 12,000 sample tubs, the latter being recycled for use again as soon as they were emptied. The coarse fraction was dried on site, weighed, bagged, labelled and logged, then sent off site for the lithic artefacts it contained to be sorted and separated, by a team of specialists.