62 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019W
hile the discoveries of sites
dating to the Neolithic,
Bronze, Iron, and Roman
Ages were exciting, as they helped
reimagine the first 4 , 500 years of
human history here, archaeologists
were perhaps most surprised by the
evidence of post-Roman life in this part
of Cambridgeshire. After the collapse
of Roman Britain in the mid-fifth
century a.d., a new era was ushered
in when groups of Germanic Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes from northern
Europe invaded the island. Once again,
the English landscape was transformed
as many Roman settlements and
institutions, and even elements of
the remaining infrastructure broke
down and were abandoned. Very
little is known about this period in
Cambridgeshire because there is a
paucity of archaeological evidence, but
the A 14 construction is beginning to
change that. “Across the whole project
the Saxon discoveries were the most
remarkable of all,” Jeffery says. “We
expected the Roman settlements, the
Iron Age settlements, and everything
else, because they have been foundelsewhere across Cambridgeshire.
We have known about them through
geophysics and crop marks. But the
number of Saxon buildings, and the
intensity of Saxon activity, really was
unexpected.”
One of the reasons Anglo-Saxon
settlements are rarely excavated is that
many of them have been continuously
occupied, and remain so today, render-ing them inaccessible. “We might find
a couple of buildings if we are lucky,”
explains Jeffery, “but we don’t get
them too often because they are under
modern villages and we just can’t reach
them.” Even when Anglo-Saxon sites
are located in more
rural areas, they can
be difficult to iden-
tify. Since they were
predominantly con-
structed of timber and
other perishable materials, Anglo-Saxon
buildings leave very little archaeo-
logical signature once they
are abandoned and the
materials decompose.
“The problem with
these structures
is that they don’t
necessarily show up
in the geophysics
because what remainsof them is so small,” Sherlock says.
“Ephemeral things, such as a line of
postholes, may not appear in a magne-
tometer survey, so you don’t find them
until you strip large areas.”
Stripping large areas is precisely
what the A 14 roadwork entails. As
a result, at least three Anglo-Saxon
settlements dating to between the
fifth and tenth centuries have been
revealed. The largest once had as
many as 50 buildings, including
houses and workshops spread across
15 acres. It is one of the big-
gest sites of its kind ever
found in the region. The
Anglo-Saxon period
in Britain is often
referred to as the
Dark Ages because
it is perceived to
have lacked culture,
especially when
compared to the
preceding Roman
period. But for Sher-
lock, some of the newLETTER FROM ENGLAND
(continued from page 60 )Three views of a Neolithic flint axhead dating to between 4000 and 2500 b.c., which
is one of the oldest artifacts discovered along the A14A well-preserved Iron
Age gold coin minted in
the mid-first century b.c.
depicts a stylized horse.g
f
A
iinn
re
D
it
h
e
c
plAn Iron Age comb fashioned from deer otherpperiishab
antler may have been used to beat
down the horizontal threads on a loom
during the production of textiles.