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So over the last few days I've helped a small group of volunteers and a few professional archaeologists excavate two trenches in the field where the axes were found.
Summary: it's back-breaking and knuckle-scraping work!
We did some fieldwalking first - each of us taking a 200m x 10m strip and searching the ground for anything interesting. A fair amount of burnt flint, some pieces of worked flint (cores and trimming flakes mostly) and a small amount of flint-tempered prehistoric pottery were found on the surface.
Meanwhile, a magnetometry survey was carried out and that appeared to show some interesting features including a possible enclosure.
With a borrowed digger we stripped the topsoil from the first trench put in the area where the axes were found and set about shoveling and troweling the subsoil out to get down to the natural chalk marl below, keeping an eye out for any possible features that might indicate a pit where the axes may have come from.
That took most of day 1 and 2, and halfway through day 2 we started a second trench across one of the geophys-revealed features.
A large area of the rest of the field was gone over with a metal detector which failed to come up with anything other that a few bits of natural ironstone and a modern brass button.
Sadly we didn't find a buried hoard of axes nor a pit where the found ones might have originated. The feature in the second trench turned out to be a post hole (or three) and possibly the remains of a shallow ditch, but nothing conclusive. All that came out of the trenches was some more pottery, burnt flint as well as some fragments of animal teeth.
Still, it was good fun and being able to see and handle the bronze axes was a privilege - they're roughly 3000 years old.
A few photos...
 The first trench being cleaned
 The second trench took three of us a bit more than a full day to dig and clean
 A palstave, two socketed axes and a quartzite (polishing?) pebble
--
simon
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