Search

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 11, 100-133

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 13, 96-160, Limited excavations were conducted on the site of Greyfriars, established in Northampton c.1236-9 and later considerably expanded into a large community. The friary church was identified but its dimensions could not be determined. Building started in mid-13th century with fairly frequent modifications of the fabric and a late 15th century reflooring. The cloister lay to the north with its main buildings adjoining the choir, not the nave. Specialist reports discuss the architectural fragments, ceramic tiles, window glass, pottery, metalwork, and human, mammal, and bird bones.

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 9, 46-56, A probable kiln group of cooking pots, wheel-turned and well-finished, in a hard sandy fabric, which is similar to that of unglazed Stamford ware, was discovered in Horsemarket, Northampton in 1971. On typological grounds and also on evidence from a small excavation nearby, the group would appear to be Saxo-Norman, 11th century.

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 10, 3-30, Between December 1971 and March 1972 excavations were carried out on a Neolithic site at Ecton. Shallow hollows, patches of burnt clay and at least one hearth were associated with a scatter of worked flints and an assemblage of Ebbsfleet and Mortlake-style Peterborough ware, and also Beaker pottery

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 19, 83-106, It was hoped that excavation immediately to the south of the Riding, a street that probably came into being late in the post-medieval period, would locate the documented Gobion Manor. Twenty sherds of pottery suggest some pre-Conquest activity, with pits and postholes dated from 1100 to post-1470, and two wall foundations of indeterminate but probable medieval date. A heavy stone foundation, at least 1m deep, has an outside wall around the three surviving sides with a pitched stone surface within resembling a hearth base, although there was no burning. To the south was a stone-lined well. Limited pottery suggests a 16th-century date. There were subsequent areas of metalling, with associated finds indicating that these were laid shortly before or after AD1600.

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 13, 169-170

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 17, 74-84, During the 10th-12th centuries the number of urban parish churches increased dramatically in all medieval towns, and it had been suggested on the basis of evidence from Nottingham and Stamford that smaller urban parishes were created out of larger rural ones. This paper examines Northampton within the context of such ideas in the light of recent historical, archaeological and topographical research.

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 17, 60-73, The four pieces of work described all lay beyond the Saxon nucleus at the west end of medieval Northampton. While small in scope, all add something to knowledge of medieval Northampton. Excavations in St George's Street and on the Mounts were concerned with the medieval defensive line. At the Mounts, beneath the floor of a cellar fronting the Mounts ironstone in clay was presumably a foundation to the town wall. To the north was what appeared to be a shallow ditch, with a narrow recut channel, which produced pottery dated c.1250-1500. At St George's Street one trench contained a small ditch, c.4m wide by 2m deep, but no dating evidence was recovered. Investigations in College Street attempted to locate the defences of the Late Saxon town; these were not found but the work provided a useful chronological sequence and produced an interesting 13th-14th century pottery assemblage. Excavations to the north of St Giles' Church were intended to discover how early settlement became established in the vicinity of the church but in the event medieval quarrying was found, which can be related to documentary sources.

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 16, 87-135, The site lay mainly along the line of the levelled castle inner bailey bank, the pre-castle levels beneath formed the primary objective of the excavation. A subsoil layer produced worked flints of Mesolithic and Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age date, with some coming from small pits or gullies. The early/middle Saxon sequence comprised: a general soil level and two separate sunken-featured buildings and some possible post-built structures. The late Saxon sequence comprised three phases: a substantial post-built structure with a cellar, a nearby sunken-featured building and other post-built structures and pits; a general soil build-up over much of the site; a smaller post-built structure, replacing the earlier building, with pits to the north and a yard to the west, with an ironpanned surface, and possible cultivated to the south. Industrial activity in the later phases of pre-Conquest use was evidenced by ferrous slag and hearth lining showing that iron smithing had been carried out nearby, along with silver and probably copper alloy working. Three St Edmund memorial coins were found, one of which came from the floor of the cellared structure, suggesting that this building belonged to the period of the Danish occupation in the later 9th to early 10th century, prior to its capture by Edward the Elder in 917

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 18, 1-33

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 19, 1-86

Northamptonshire Archaeology, 16, 1-211, Excavations in Chalk Lane, Northampton, 1975-197: Sheet 1: Structural, 1-36. Sheet 2: The pottery and other finds. Part 1, 37-130. Sheet 3: The other finds. Part 2, 131-211

The report very briefly summarizes the research performed during the contract period March 1, 1964, to February 28, 1971. The emphasis of the research was on the discovery and development of techniques for automatically indexing and classifying documents. The research was limited to statistical techniques rather than semantic or syntactic. A bibliography of technical reports published is included. (Author/SJ)

Experience of browsing with a text retrieval system is reported. The technique discussed consists of adding and deleting query terms on successive interactive cycles. The number of hits consistently increased, while the number of false drops consistently decreased on successive cycles. The search system used allows non-Boolean free form query statements. Therefore, an abstract may be used as a query with the objective of finding similar abstracts from the file. (Author)

A series of experiments was performed to investigate the effectiveness and utility of automatically classifying documents through the use of multiple discriminant functions. Classification is accomplished by computing the distance from the mean vector of each category to the vector of observed frequencies of a document and assigning the document to the category having the highest probability. Data concerning the effect of the principal classification parameters on classification performance is reported, based on a data base of approximately 2700 abstracts from the solid state physics field. The parameters studied were the number of sample documents required to define a category, the length of documents, the inter-relationship of the number of sample documents and their lengths, the relation of the number of word types in a document to the number of categories, and performance measures. A higher performance level was obtained when samples of 140 documents were used to define each category than with samples of 35 and 70 documents. Classification results obtained on independent test sets of documents ranged from 73 to 92 per cent. The test sets contained 419 and 1333 documents. Results are also reported in terms of Swets' effectiveness measure and Cleverdon's ratios of relevance, recall and precision. (Author)

To support studies in automatic indexing, classification and extracting, a general purpose frequency program was developed to further theoretical and practical understanding of text word distributions. While the program is primarily designed for counting strings of character-oriented data, it can be used without change for counting any items which can be represented in an integral number of characters. Counts may be obtained simultaneously at several levels of detail, such as for sentences, paragraphs, chapters and entire documents. Both printed outputs and outputs for further computer processing may be obtained, and a variety of summary and detailed outputs are available. The program, titled FRQNCY, is written in the Fortran IV language and was compiled and run on the IBM System/360 using Fortran IV (G) and the System/360 Operating System. It uses at least one feature of the IBM System/360 Fortran IV language (LOGICAL*1 and INTEGER*2 variables) which is not in USASI Fortran and hence may not compile or run under other Fortran systems. The program is extensively parametrized to allow its efficient use on computers with varying amounts of immediate-access storage and input/output equipment. The report is a complete writeup of the frequency program. It covers the purpose and usage of the program and also describes its organization and internal operation. Guidelines for modifying the program or adapting it to different computers are included. (Author)