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Books : reviews

Sam Lucy, Christopher (2) Evans.
Romano-British Settlement and Cemeteries: Mucking excavations by Margaret and Tom Jones, 1965-1978.
Oxbow. 2016

Excavations at Mucking, Essex, between 1965 and 1978, revealed extensive evidence for a multi-phase rural Romano-British settlement, perhaps an estate centre, and five associated cemetery areas (170 burials) with different burial areas reserved for different groups within the settlement. The settlement demonstrated clear continuity from the preceding Iron Age occupation with unbroken sequences of artefacts and enclosures through the first century AD, followed by rapid and extensive remodelling, which included the laying out of a Central Enclosure and an organised water supply with wells, accompanied by the start of large-scale pottery production. After the mid-second century AD the Central Enclosure was largely abandoned and settlement shifted its focus more to the Southern Enclosure system with a gradual decline though the 3rd and 4th centuries although continued burial, pottery and artefactual deposition indicate that a form of settlement continued, possibly with some low-level pottery production. Some of the latest Roman pottery was strongly associated with the earliest Anglo-Saxon style pottery suggesting the existence of a terminal Roman settlement phase that essentially involved an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ community. Given recent revisions of the chronology for the early Anglo-Saxon period, this casts an intriguing light on the transition, with radical implications for understandings of this period. Each of the cemetery areas was in use for a considerable length of time. Taken as a whole, Mucking was very much a componented place/complex; it was its respective parts that fostered its many cemeteries, whose diverse rites reflect the variability and roles of the settlement’s evidently varied inhabitants.

Christopher (2) Evans, Grahame Appleby, Sam Lucy.
Lives in Land: Mucking excavations by Margaret and Tom Jones, 1965-1978: prehistory, context and summary.
Oxbow. 2016

Mucking was a major archaeological dig, carried out between 1965–1978, that covered an area of 44 acres near Mucking in southern Essex. It was the first opportunity to excavate an Anglo-Saxon settlement site and its associated cemetery simultaneously, but it also uncovered highly significant features from the Neolithic to the Medieval period.

Mucking was a site like no other. Not only was this a matter of its size and ‘total archaeology’ excavation policy, but that the long-term intensity of its settlement sequence generated more than a million finds and 40,000 features, including some 1145 burials and 400 structures. Clearly relating to the site’s strategic location at the narrowing of the Thames Estuary, its sequence was unusually rich and full.

This volume is primarily concerned with Mucking’s prehistory and it presents a number of ‘extraordinaries’: eight round barrows, a Bronze Age fieldsystem, the concentric-circuit South Rings ringwork, more than 100 roundhouses and an unparalleled late Iron Age ceremonial complex involving square-barrows and huge-scale grain storage. Yet, as its subtitle announces, the book also overviews Mucking’s longer term sequence (i.e. Roman and Anglo-Saxon) and – drawing upon the wealth of the project’s archival sources – fully situates the fieldwork in its historiographical context.

Christopher (2) Evans, Duncan Mackay, Leo Webley.
Borderlands: the archaeology of the Addenbrooke's environs, south Cambridge.
Cambridge Archaeological Unit. 2008

This is the first volume in a new Cambridge Archaeological Unit publication initiative, New Archaeologies of the Cambridge Region. Taking its inspiration from Cyril Fox’s ground-breaking 1923 study of its namesake (and issued to mark that volume’s 85th anniversary), the series is dedicated to the archaeology of Cambridge’s hinterland. The publication relates the 2002/03 Hutchison Site excavations along the west side of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. While primarily concerned with its Iron Age/Roman Conquest-Period dynamics, there was also significant later Bronze Age and Middle Saxon occupation.

The site’s sequence both informs, and is informed by, the results of an evaluation survey extending over 200 ha west to the River Cam, which led to the recovery of some 20 new sites. Thereafter, three other landscape valuation case-studies are presented, drawn both from the County’s southern chalklands and, also its western and northern clays. Seeing comparable site-discovery rates – their results, thereby allow archaeologists to appreciate for the first time what is, in effect, the past fabric of the land – and this enormous increase in site densities has fundamental implications for understanding early land use and settlement/population levels. The case is made that such grand-scale surveys should be considered as ‘stand-alone’ programmes of investigation in their own right. Arguably an ethos which Fox himself would have thoroughly approved, a historiographic perspective is promoted throughout and reappraisal is made of, and new archival sources included from, a number of earlier South Cambridge excavations.

Christopher (2) Evans, Sam Lucy, Ricky Patten Webley.
Riversides: neolithic barrows, a Beaker grave, iron age and Anglo-Saxon burials and settlement at Trumpington, Cambridge.
Oxbow. 2018

Where Three Rivers Meet – the 2010–11 excavations along Trumpington’s riverside proved extraordinary on a number of counts. Particularly for its ‘dead’, as it included Neolithic barrows (one with a mass interment), a double Beaker grave and an Early Anglo-Saxon cemetery, with a rich bed-burial interment in the latter accompanied by a rare gold cross. Associated settlement remains were recovered with each.

Most significant was the site's Early Iron Age occupation. This yielded enormous artefact assemblages and was intensively sampled for economic data. The depositional dynamics of its pit clusters are here interrogated in depth. This period saw a high number of burials and loose human bone (some worked as implements), and emphasis is duly given to the settlement’s ‘ritual logic’, which seems predominantly motivated by bird associations. With males suffering head-wound trauma, the evidence of the immediate region’s distinctly circular-plan ringwork forts is reviewed and, arguably, contestation and violence is attested.

Not only does the volume provide a summary of the development of the now widely investigated greater Trumpington/Addenbrooke’s landscape – including its major Middle Bronze Age settlements and an important Late Iron Age complex – but also it overviews recent fieldwork results from South Cambridgeshire. Aside from historiographically themed Inset sections (plus an account of the War Ditches’ Anglo-Saxon cemetery and Grantchester’s settlement of that period), there are detailed scientific analyses (e.g. DNA, isotopic and wear studies of its human bone) and more than 30 radiocarbon dates were achieved. The concluding chapter critically addresses issues of local continuity and de facto notions of ‘settlement evolution’.

Christopher (2) Evans, Gavin Lucas.
Hinterlands and Inlands: the archaeology of West Cambridge and Roman Cambridge revisited.
Oxbow. 2020

Thinking Hinterlands – Spanning 25 years of fieldwork across a 3 sq. km swathe on the west side of Cambridge, this and its companion volume present the results of 15 sites, including seven cemeteries. The main focus is on the area’s prehistoric ‘inland’ colonization (particularly its Middle Bronze Age horizon) and the dynamics of its Roman hinterland settlements. The latter involves a variety of farmsteads, a major roadside centre and a villa-estate complex, and the excavation programme represents one of the most comprehensive studies of the Roman countryside anywhere within the lands of its former empire. Appropriately, this book also includes a review of Roman Cambridge, appraising its status as a town.

With such a body of amassed data to draw upon, comparative statistical analyses are employed throughout, alongside an array of scientific studies that include ancient DNA. Both books also have a historiographic dimension relating to the landscape’s specific suburban situation and its latter-day colonization by the University. Earlier excavations by Jenkinson at Girton College and Marr’s Traveller’s Rest Pit investigations are reviewed, with the ‘archaeology’ of the Darwin Family Estate and the Newall Telescope also featured.

The collective results are groundbreaking. This was a densely packed landscape, and the scale and coherence of the cumulative excavation programme provides significant insights concerning prehistoric and Roman-period settlement densities. What their proximity implies for economic and social practices, and the area’s long-term land-use succession – the comings and goings of communities and ‘history’ – are explored in depth.