Iron age shrine and Romano British temple on Lancing Down

Lancing Down Iron Age Shrine & Romano British Temple - Sussex England

When some Lancing folk told me that an Iron Age Shrine was excavated during 1980 on Lancing Down in West Sussex I became interested in finding the location to see if any features showed using GE. The problem was the precise location was not known locally.

After some research I found a paper published by archaeologists who excavated the site in 1980. The paper included a site plan but did not precisely identify the location. However, the plan did include the position of two concrete posts and as I had a rough idea of the location I looked on GE to see if the posts were visible. Luckily they were just discernible in the 2007 imagery so this allowed me to very precisely overlay the site plan and then measure the location coordinates and visit the site with GPS in hand to see if anything is visible on the ground.

The attached kmz contains an overlay – 1980 dig plan which is a copy of the published plan showing the position of the excavated Iron age shrine plus a lot of assumed detail. The large square feature shown with dotted lines was not excavated but assumed on the basis that a Romano British temple was indicated by the trench exposing the north east corner of a building. I have shown the location of the two concrete posts with place marks.

There is more to this story which I shall continue in the next post.

Lancing Down Shrine.kmz (65.91 KB)

The kmz in this post is similar to the previous but now also contains an overlay ‘1980 Excavation’ This shows the extent of the features exposed in 1980 but does not show the speculated remains.

A 3D representation of what the temple may have looked like is also included.

When I visited the temple site my pocket GPS is not sufficiently accurate to locate the north west corner of the temple wall foundation to better than +/- 3m. However it is good enough for me to find the concrete posts mentioned above. So, having established a datum I was able to use a tape measure and determine the theoretical position of the north west corner on the ground.

To my amazement a line of flint can be seen in exactly the correct place and aligned to exactly the correct bearing. This is remarkable considering that the existing path runs directly over this point.

I have set the Snapshot view in the overlays and folder so navigation should be easy.

Lancing Down Shrine 02.kmz (3.64 MB)

I am very impressed with your model and the pains you have taken to place it accurately, although I'd like to know more about how you decided on the shape of the building, when all your archeological study gave you was one corner. Did you base the second storied structure on some other building known to have existed in the period or did you have to rely purely on guess work? I was also amused by the legionnaire you placed inside the building.



For the sake of keeping related materials together, I'd suggest you delete this post and add the model to a revised version of your earlier post on the site. Even if you don't combine the files, you can attach more than one to the same post.

Thank you for the comment and questions Washi.

I should point out that I am not an archaeologist. My interest and hobby has been the use of software tools to explore the history of my local landscape here in southern England. GE is of course the best tool around for this.

The temple model I have used (which I only claim may have looked like the original) is not my first choice. My original single story attempt was dismissed immediately by local archaeologists who advised that I should base my model on the Romano British temple at Maiden castle. If you take a look here you will see something that is similar to what I have used.

The floor plan of the building was originally determined in 1828 and recorded in 1830 - see below. However, until at least 1950 the location was incorrectly recorded by Ordnance Survey to be over 100m SW of the location dug in 1980 so I was not sure if there were two sites or one.




I shall look into merging the two posts as you have suggested.

Dec 9, 2016 16:34:37 GMT briand said:

I should point out that I am not an archaeologist. My interest and hobby has been the use of software tools to explore the history of my local landscape here in southern England. GE is of course the best tool around for this.

If I were to write a statement about how I use Google Earth, it would sound remarkably similar, except that I explore (for the most part) the history Japan.  I must say that I admire your rigor and your "boots on the ground" approach to learning about your world.