56 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019
LETTER FROM ENGLAND
middle of a construction zone, a huge
infrastructure project to upgrade and
extend a 21 -mile stretch of the A 14
roadway between the towns of Cam-
bridge and Huntingdon. Houghton
is one of the final sites that must be
cleared before the archaeologists’ work
is complete and they surrender this
tract of land to the advancing army of
road builders.
England is so archaeologically rich
that hardly any construction project
takes place without encountering at
least some evidence of its deep his-
torical past. But, unlike what they
encounter during most preconstruc-
tion or rescue excavations, here the
archaeologists aren’t investigating a
single site from a single time period,
but dozens of sites spanning nearly the
entirety of English history. According
to Highways England’s Steve Sherlock,
archaeology manager for the A 14 exca-
vations, the dig’s scale is unprecedent-
ed. “It’s the biggest road archaeological
project in the country and the largest
project of this nature that has ever
been undertaken here,” he says.
Since it would be nearly impossible
to conduct fieldwork along all of the
A 14 construction corridor, archaeolo-
gists conducted intensive preliminary
geophysical work, field assessments,
and exploratory excavations that
included an astounding 17 miles of test
trenches to see where potential sites
might be located. They finally homed
in on a targeted area of 1. 4 square
miles to fully excavate, an expanse
slightly larger than New York’s Central
Park. Ultimately, this epic endeavor
would require a team of more than
250 archaeologists.E
ngland’s long history is marked by
a series of transformative events.
Some of these are hard to pin-
point, such as the adoption of bronze
or iron technology. Others are more
easily recognizable, such as the Roman,
Anglo-Saxon, and Norman invasions.
All of this history played out on the
Cambridgeshire countryside, creating
a giant palimpsest that has been builtupon, erased, and built upon again, over
a millennia-long cycle. As the road-
work has slowly cut a swath through
the county, it has become possible to
imagine how the landscape might have
looked at different periods, almost like
turning the pages of a flipbook. “The
preliminary work suggested there was a
lot here,” Sherlock says, “but there have
been tremendously exciting surprises
along the way.”
In all, the A 14 team discovered
three Neolithic henges, 300 burials
in seven cemeteries, dozens of small
Iron Age and Roman farmsteads, 40
Roman pottery kilns, three Anglo-
Saxon villages, and the abandoned
medieval hamlet of Houghton. They
have amassed seven tons of pottery,
five tons of animal bones, and 140
tons of environmental soil samples.
Among the 8 , 000 excavated artifacts
are Bronze Age stone tools, pieces
of Iron Age weaving equipment,
and, from the Roman era, copper
brooches, jet jewelry, a soldier’s belt
buckle, and even a fragment of aCambridgeshire
Area of DetailExisting Roads
Proposed Route
ExcavationsHuntingdonGodmanchesterCambridgeBrampton0 1 2 milesGREAT
BRITAIN