A programme of mitigation across an area 30m x 30m area was carried out on behalf of Richard Smalley at RPS Ltd, in advance of the construction of new manufacturing and warehouse sheds on land at Parsonage Way, Warndon, Worcestershire. The excavation followed two earlier phases of evaluation that recorded a possible Iron Age oven and pits, and a Roman ditch. This work was carried out in accordance with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists Standard and Guidance for archaeological excavation (2014). The mitigation project was able to identify several phases of activity between the late second-early first millennium BC and the medieval period. At the very least it is possible to say that there was a post-built structure on the site in the first millennium BC which may have been used as a temporary shelter of indeterminate duration and was associated with a curious form of oven with a long flue. It was not part of a permanent settlement and may have been constructed adjacent to a fallen tree in which an exceptional amount of quartzite pebbles had accumulated. Some of the pebbles were used in a hot-stone process that may have been domestic in nature. However, a less prosaic interpretation is also possible and it has been argued that the fallen tree could have provided an unusual cache of raw material for the creation of hot water and steam, perhaps so unusual that a structure for its use was built adjacent to it. This structure may have been an appropriate place to carry out rituals associated with purification, a tradition thousands of years old but which has become archaeologically invisible in the morass of structures recorded on settlement sites. Salt was an important component of the cleansing process. The curious flue built across the stone cache remains difficult to envisage as a superstructure but may have piped hot air into the post-built structure. By the end of the Roman period the site had been crossed by a ditch which may have divided fields of cultivation and it was part of the open fields during the medieval period.
Kleisoura et al. (Wed,) studied this question.