58 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019
LETTER FROM ENGLAND
ficult, especially when digging along the
course of a Roman road. But, given the
extent of the excavations, researchers
now have a much more complete view
of how this area was organized during
the period.
Travelers following that Roman
road from Cambridge to Godma-
nchester during the first few centu-
riesa.d. would have recognized the
telltale signs of the Roman economic,
industrial, and administrative machine
at work. Along the journey, they
would have seen large villas and
small farms scattered across the
landscape, as well as an agricultural
supply depot with an artificial pond.
A network of small trackways linked
the depot to outlying satellite farms.
Closer to Huntingdon, near the west-
ern banks of the Great Ouse, they
might have passed one of the dozens
of Roman pottery kilns, evidence of
the area’s ceramics industry, which was
enabled by the river’s abundant clay
deposits. According to Sherlock, the
area had all the necessary resourcesto support a booming pottery trade.
“You’ve got your clay, you’ve got your
Roman road, you’ve got the Great
Ouse, and you have Godmanchester,”
he says. “The material, the transport
links, and the demand are all together.”
As archaeologists moved across
the landscape over the past two years,
they also exposed an unexpected his-
tory more than 4 , 000 years older
than the Romans. Sherlock and his
team now know that the earliest evi-
dence of human occupation in thisA series of rectangular enclosures comprise a Roman-era supply depot. This complex was connected to several outlying
farmsteads through a road network that facilitated the transfer of agricultural products to this central distribution center.
A small bone fragment used as a
writing tablet bears a Latin text that
may include someone’s name written
in a cursive hand.t
te
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