Late Iron Age And Roman Settlement At Bozeat Quarry Northamptonshire Excavations 1995 2016

MOLA (formerly Northamptonshire Archaeology), has undertaken intermittent archaeological work within Bozeat Quarry, Northamptonshire, over a twenty-year period from 1995-2016 covering an area of 59ha. This volume presents excavation findings including evidence of a Late Iron Age and Roman Settlement.

MOLA undertook archaeological excavations at Brackmills, Northampton, investigating part of a large Iron Age settlement and Roman complex farmstead. The remains were very well preserved having, in places, been shielded from later truncaton by colluvial deposits. Earlier remains included a late Bronze Age/early Iron Age pit alignment.

Between 1990 and 1998, MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) undertook a series of archaeological excavations within Wollaston Quarry covering an area of 116ha. Eight excavation areas and a watching brief were undertaken revealing evidence of Neolithic pits, late Bronze Age/early Iron Age pit alignments and Iron Age to Roman settlements.

This volume reports the results of intermittent archaeological mitigation works for the A43 Corby Link Road, Northamptonshire, undertaken by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) between June 2012 to October 2013. Evidence was uncovered relating to Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman and Saxon settlements.

Archaeological work on land at Upton Park south of Weedon Road, Northampton, uncovered, among other evidence, two Bronze Age/early Iron Age sinuous pit alignments. The extensive work and examination of the two pit alignments at Upton has allowed a typology of the variable areas of pits (and related ditches) to be postulated.

Excavations at Wollaston Quarry, near Wellingborough, uncovered a single late 7th century grave, the Pioneer burial. The burial contained artefacts indicative of very high status, with the early to middle Saxon helmet being at the time only the fourth to have been recovered from a burial in England.

Extensive excavations by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) near Houghton Regis and Toddington, in south Central Bedfordshire, provide a detailed multi-period dataset for regional and national comparison. Evidence ranges from middle/late Bronze Age pits to medieval settlements.

The open area excavation of nearly a half of the small deserted medieval hamlet of West Cotton, Raunds, Northamptonshire has revealed the dynamic processes of constant development in a way that has rarely been achieved on other comparable sites in England. Its origins have been seen to lie in the mid tenth-century plantation of a planned settlement based on regular one-acre plots, which occurred within the political context of the reconquest of eastern England by the Saxon kings and the subsequent reorganisation of settlement and society within the Danelaw. The settlement contained a major holding comprising a timber hall with ancillary buildings and an adjacent watermill, with perhaps a second similar holding and dependent peasants nearby. It was established on the edge of the floodplain at the confluence of a tributary stream with the River Nene, on a major valley-bottom route way. The processes of redevelopment which led to the rebuilding in stone in the twelfth century, as a small Norman manor house; the probable relocation of the manor buildings in the thirteenth century; and its final form in the fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century as a hamlet of peasant tenements have been well documented by the archaeological evidence. In particular, it has been vividly shown how the final form of the settlement, preserved in earthwork, was merely a fairly brief episode at the end of this extended process of development, while the historic evidence provides no hint of the higher-status elements that had formed an integral part of the settlement until the final century of its occupation. Desertion appears to have been a gradual process, with the tenements abandoned one-by-one through a century of economic and social disasters, of which the Black Death was the most notable, as families presumably moved to better quality land then readily available elsewhere. The role of the local environment in the processes of change has also been well documented, with the abandonment of the watermill in the twelfth century resulting from a disruption of the water supply caused by a period of intense flooding and alluviation, when the very survival of the settlement was only ensured by the construction of a protective flood bank. The excavated structural evidence is of high quality, and has provided numerous complete building plans ranging from the timber halls of the tenth and eleventh centuries, through the manor house of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, to the well-preserved tenements of the fourteenth century. This is complemented by substantial artefact assemblages, and the consideration of the local economy and environment is largely dependent on the analysis of the faunal evidence and the environmental evidence derived from an extensive programme of soil sampling.