Construction of the Abberton pipeline has provided the first opportunity for a major excavation within a Roman small town in Suffolk for more than 20 years. The pipeline, which extends from Kirtling Green (Suffolk) at the north end to Wormingford (Essex) at the south, also provided an opportunity to investigate the hinterland of the Roman town. Wixoe is one of only eight small towns known within the county and appears to have developed on both banks of the River Stour, close to an ancient crossing point and adjacent to the Via Devana. Apart from antiquarian investigations, little archaeological work had been undertaken within the town. Recently, however, extensive fieldwalking and metal detecting surveys conducted by local amateur archaeologists have led to the recovery of over 4,000 coins from the site of the town and its environs. A much clearer history of the town has begun to emerge as a result of the fieldwalking, geophysical survey, evaluation and excavation undertaken in advance of the pipeline project. This work has shown that Wixoe was a post-Boudican planned town probably established at a similar time to several others in the region. The town appears to have reached its peak in the 2nd century, following which there seems to have been a slow decline (at least in the excavated part of the settlement) leading to its eventual abandonment in the very late 4th or early 5th century. The excavations produced a significant fmds assemblage that includes a major collection of pottery, analysis of which has identified supply patterns similar to other civilian Roman 'borderland' settlements in the region, especially Great Chesterford.

Excavations at Cedars Park revealed a late Iron Age farmstead that remained occupied until the mid-4th century AD. The late Iron Age settlement comprised two ditched enclosures with associated roundhouses and other features. Four post structures probably for the storage of plant based foodstuffs were located well away from the settlement enclosures. In the early Romano-British period, the northern enclosure was converted to agricultural use; a system of parallel linear gullies, likely to have been associated with arable farming or horticulture, was laid out here and also across the upper slopes of large parts of the adjacent hillside. In the southern enclosure, new buildings were put up (roundhouses and a rectangular post-built structure) and the enclosure ditches were re-dug. By the mid-3nd century the southern enclosure had been surrounded on three sides by a system of ditched small enclosures and paddocks. Three buildings (a three-roomed domestic building and two bathhouses) were constructed partly in stone, along with rectangular timber buildings (posts and sill beam construction) and two new roundhouses. Droveways and a stock-handling area were established in the eastern part of the site. The farmstead's principal buildings fell into decay or were demolished in the late 3rd or early 4th century. However, despite the absence of recognisable new structures, the site continued to be occupied. Later Roman activity was represented mainly by finds-rich occupation layers which had only survived truncation from modern agricultural activity where they lay in natural depressions or in the tops of earlier features. Pottery and coins indicate that the site continued to be occupied until around the middle of the 4th century. The site thus fits in with the picture emerging from other late Roman rural sites in East Anglia, where cut features are rare but continuing occupation is nevertheless represented by surface spreads of dark earth containing 3rd- and 4th-century cultural material.

Seven discrete areas of land were excavated by Archaeological Solutions to the north-east of Stowmarket in Mid Suffolk, on the clay hillside above the river Gipping. Four phases of medieval and post-medieval land use were identified; the main period of activity was in the 13th–14th centuries AD. To the north of Cedars Park, where the hillside levels off to a plateau, excavation revealed part of an enclosed farmstead. The remains of two buildings with earth-fast foundations were identified, as well as cobbled yard surfaces, numerous quarry and rubbish pits and a large pond or watering hole. On the lower slopes to the south-west was an area of roadside settlement marked by regular property boundaries/drainage ditches either side of Creeting Road. The direct relationship between the road and the medieval boundary ditches demonstrates that it was in use by the 13th century if not earlier. Because the excavation areas were set back slightly from the road, evidence of dwellings was absent. However, the rear areas of several roadside tofts, containing cobbled yard surfaces and the remains of barns or other agricultural buildings, were revealed. Scattered pits containing quantities of pottery, animal bone and other domestic rubbish attested to occupation close by. Field name evidence indicates that the settlement lay on the edge of a green which had been enclosed by the early post-medieval period. It is likely to have been directly associated with the medieval manor at Thorney Hall, 250m to the west. To the east of the site, close to Sheepcote Hall, was a small double-ditched stock enclosure which is thought to have been used for corralling sheep, with another area of medieval roadside settlement nearby at the junction of Creeting Road and Mill Street. Cedars Park was probably settled under the favourable environmental conditions of the 12th and early 13th centuries, at a time of rising population. The spread of small, dispersed settlement sites across the landscape was also a result of the gradual breakup of the large late Saxon royal estate of Thorney into a multitude of separate manors. The reasons for the abandonment of much of the site around the mid 14th century are unknown but the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, and the difficulty of farming the local clay soil in the worsening climate of the 14th century, may have played a part. The enclosed farmstead can be tentatively identified with a tenement documented in the records of Thorney Hall manor court, which was owned by one William Le Newman until its abandonment in c.1340. At the end of the 14th century, the green-edge plots were probably held by one Geoffrey Atte Grene. By 1408, Geoffrey’s tenements had passed to Thomas Mysterton, a gentleman, who is unlikely to have occupied them himself. Changing patterns of land ownership therefore contributed to the final abandonment of this part of the site. Subsequent agricultural land use was represented by a series of field boundary ditches which closely matched those recorded on the 1839 Stowupland tithe map. The dispersed medieval settlements at Cedars Park were occupied by people of relatively low status, with little evidence for specialised agricultural or craft production and few signs of wealth. Mixed farming with an important pastoral component produced enough food for their subsistence and a modest surplus with which they were able to purchase pottery and other commodities at local markets; most items found at the site were produced within a thirty-mile radius. Similar small farms and roadside or green-edge settlements were typical of the medieval landscape of the Suffolk, Essex and Norfolk claylands. However, while these types of dispersed settlement are well known from documentary records and field survey, very few have been subject to modern open-area excavation and the recovery of detailed structural, economic and environmental evidence.

Excavations were conducted in the early 1970s at the site of an elaborate Roman farmstead at Newnham, Bedfordshire. Nearly all of the Roman remains have been destroyed by gravel quarrying that began in the 1950s. The excavations, under the direction of the late Angela Simco, recorded part of the core area of the farmstead and recovered significant assemblages of artefacts and animal bone. Post-excavation analysis and publication was not completed at the time and the site archive eventually passed to Bedford Museum in 2000. Funding from the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, distributed by English Heritage, allowed the results of fieldwork to be published.The farmstead probably originated in the 1st century AD, just before the Roman conquest, and was initially fairly typical of contemporary rural settlements in the Great Ouse Valley. Settlement was characterised by ditched enclosures, some of which were used for livestock management, with a mixture of roundhouses and rectangular buildings of simple earthfast-post construction. By the end of the 2nd century, however, the site had acquired at least one relatively substantial rectangular building with stone foundations, suggesting a degree of ‘Romanisation’ not usually apparent on farmsteads in the Bedford region. In the 3rd century an even more elaborate stone-founded building was constructed, which comprised a range of rooms with under-floor heating. The stone footings had been heavily robbed, hampering detailed interpretation, but three of the hypocaust rooms in the later building are thought to have been a bath suite.Elements of the finds assemblage also suggest that the site had a higher status than that of other farmsteads in the region. Fine-ware pottery and continental imports are relatively well represented, while ceramic building materials and painted wall plaster indicate a degree of prosperity, albeit not on the scale of villa sites known elsewhere. The faunal assemblage has a species profile somewhere between that of contemporary local farmsteads and classic villa sites of the wider region. Other high-status indicators are absent, and the paucity of the coin assemblage suggests a largely unmonetised economy, at least prior to the 4th century AD. Because of this apparent ambiguity, the authors conclude that the Newnham farmstead should not be classed as a ‘villa’. Instead it is suggested that the later buildings housed the administrative and/or communal functions of a large organised farm, without the luxurious domestic element of a villa. The focus of farming operations was probably livestock (mainly cattle and sheep), which culminated at the end of the 4th century in commercial butchery to supply lamb or wool to other settlements.After the end of Roman administration in Britain the ruined farmstead seems to have been a site of early Anglo-Saxon settlement. This is evidenced by the presence of Anglo-Saxon pottery, although hardly any features can be dated to this period.The main datasets analysed for this report consist of structural records, pottery (excluding the amphorae, now missing), ceramic building material, a range of other artefacts (animal products, metalwork, glass, stone, plaster/mortar and slag), and animal bone. The small collection of human bone is fragmentary or from unphased contexts and is not analysed in detail. Because this is a rather unusual site for the locality, detailed specialist reports and full catalogues are included with this report on a CD-ROM, to aid comparison of the Newnham assemblages with those from other sites.

A Bronze Age barrow, one of several in the Rhee valley, was encircled by two concentric rings of posts in the early to middle Iron Age, and a single crouched inhumation was buried nearby. A small group of roundhouses and granaries was built on the clays c.100m from the river, and nearly 200 possible grain storage pits were dug on chalk deposits next to the river. Some of the pits contained human burials and animal bone groups of the pit burial tradition common in central southern and south-eastern England Significant assemblages of Chinnor-Wandlebury pottery and animal bone, including examples of rarely-found wild species, were also found. The site was unoccupied in the late Iron Age and Roman periods but still farmed, as evidenced by animal pens, field ditches and sparse domestic debris probably spread by manuring. During the later 6th century AD, a small open farming settlement of six sunken-featured buildings was established, akin to many similar settlements investigated in South Cambridgeshire. A substantial ditch enclosed the settlement in the 8th or 9th century, and occupation had shifted to Harston village by the 10th century.

The investigations have produced evidence for 6,000 years of landscape and settlement evolution. Perhaps the most striking result is the evidence for continuity, rather than discontinuity, in the development of the landscape. The act of defining chronological periods, while essential in describing past human society, does tend to accentuate discontinuity. This applies both to individual monuments — some on the Biddenham Loop played a major part in people’s lives for many generations — and to the wider landscape itself. The Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments were incorporated into the middle Bronze Age field systems and some were still used for the burial of the dead. Continued use of these fields into the middle Iron Age and even the Romano-British period is clearly evidenced by the way in which later farmsteads were set up on their periphery. The positioning of the main early Iron Age pit alignment across the Biddenham Loop has elements of both discontinuity and continuity. It does ‘cut’ a number of ditched boundaries but does so at the corners of fields, so that over the majority of its course it crosses unenclosed land between two separate middle Bronze Age field systems. For the Roman–Saxon transition it is significant that the majority of the evidence for early Saxon settlement occurs in the vicinity of Romano-British settlements.

Botolph Bridge, now within urban Peterborough, lay beside an important crossing of the River Nene and once formed part of a well-known medieval vill, referenced in Domesday Book. Botolph Bridge was noted for its well preserved medieval earthworks but since the late 1980s these have gradually been destroyed by housing development. An earthwork survey carried out in 1982 amply demonstrated the complexity and importance of the site, showing a church and manorial complex with house plots strung out along an adjacent road and fields separated from the main settlement by a hollow way. Excavation demonstrated that the manorial enclosure had replaced earlier house plots by c.1200. In the later 14th century, there was considerable investment by the manorial holders, the Draytons. A manorial farm was built above earlier fields, with stone buildings constructed around a courtyard including a farmhouse, dovecote and ancillary buildings. Within the manorial enclosure itself, further agricultural buildings were laid out. All these buildings had been abandoned by c.1600. The church, located just north of the excavation area, was finally demolished in 1695.

This publication describes a relatively small excavation (by CAM ARC, now Oxford Archaeology East), whose size belies its significance. Incredibly, this is the first properly documented archaeological excavation in the core of Wisbech - an historic town long suspected to have preserved interesting medieval deposits. It fills a gaping void in previous knowledge of the character and quality of the archaeological remains in the town and represents an important first step in redressing the regional imbalance in published medieval port sequences, such as those of King's Lynn and Great Yarmouth. The site lies within the confines of the New Market, to the north of the Norman castle. An impressive sequence of deeply stratified medieval to early post-medieval deposits was revealed, demonstrating at least thirteen building phases, the earliest of which dates to the 13th century. One structure contained evidence for in-situ metalworking during the mid 14th to mid 15th century. The buildings were each sealed by fine silts deposited during episodic flooding which can be broadly linked to documented climatic conditions of the period. Detailed recording was achieved through micromorphological analysis and the use of high resolution thin sections. While the alternate sequence of occupation and flooding found at Wisbech is broadly comparable to deposits in other regional port towns, it is almost without parallel in terms of its completeness, depth and state of preservation. A wealth of organic remains and subtle features are present, which rarely survive elsewhere in East Anglia. The discovery of this important archaeological resource highlights the requirement for consideration of its future management.

Seven period-based chapters set out a research agenda by looking at the evidence available across the region, identifying gaps in knowledge and suggesting research topics. A thematic chapter puts forward research issues which cut across period divisions and which could be usefully addressed within the region. The concluding chapter sets out a research strategy which considers priorities for research and outlines an integrated approach within the region, exploring collaborative arrangements and partnerships.

This review of Research and Archaeology augments the regional research framework, which appeared in two parts as a Resource Assessment (Glazebrook ed. 1997); and a Research Agenda and Strategy (Brown and Glazebrook eds 2000). The review considers new evidence on a period-by-period basis, with each period subdivided into an assessment of key projects undertaken since 2000, an assessment of progress on research topics proposed in 2000 and a consideration of future research topics. The regional research framework was never intended to be a fixed point but rather a dynamic process through which the region's archaeology can be influenced, and subject to periodic review and revision. All three parts of the framework are available online (at www.eaareports.org.uk) and will be kept live and updated by the historic environment community of the East of England as new discoveries are made and new research priorities established.

From February 2003 to March 2005, Oxford Archaeology (OA) carried out a programme of archaeological work in King's Lynn comprising evaluation, strip and map, excavation and watching brief integrated with the redevelopment of the Vancouver Centre and the construction of the Clough Lane multi-storey car park. The work was carried out on behalf of Alfred McAlpine Capital Projects. Despite extensive modern construction, archaeological features, structures and deposits of medieval date (12th-15th centuries) were recorded along the existing frontages of Broad Street and New Conduit Street. Archaeological deposits, building foundations and yard surfaces of late medieval/post-medieval date (15th and 16th-18th centuries) were recorded in localised areas in the car parks to the rear of Sainsburys, the rear of Broad Street and to the south west of New Conduit Street. Piezometers were installed in order to carry out a two-year monitoring programme on the physical and chemical effects of the development's piled construction on the underlying, and otherwise unexposed, reclaimed marine and estuarine sediments. Evaluation of the Clough Lane car park site revealed an intact marine sediment sequence underlying all of the development area as well as localised medieval structures and features.

Between 1998 and 2001, Albion Archaeology (formerly Bedfordshire County Archaeology Service) carried out a series of archaeological investigations in advance of development at Marsh Leys on the outskirts of Bedford. Although the discovery of flint artefacts suggested limited earlier prehistoric activity, the first firm evidence for sustained use of the site was a ditched enclosure, which pre-dated the late Iron Age. The vast majority of the archaeological evidence was associated with two Romano-British farm sites c. 400m apart. The farms varied in size over time, ranging from c.1ha to 3.3ha. Their layout, morphology, chronological development through three distinct phases, mixed farming economy and environment were similar, although subtle contrasts were identified.

This report presents the results of archaeological investigations undertaken in 20035 along the 6km route of the A505 Baldock bypass, Hertfordshire. The evidence spans the late Neolithic to the medieval period, although no evidence for activity from the later 5th century to the beginning of the 11th century was found. The late Neolithic evidence was dispersed across the route corridor and comprised bowl-shaped pits, shaft-like pits and a small funerary enclosure. Early Bronze Age activity was restricted to the northern portion of the route and included a small roundhouse and a cluster of seven barrows. These barrows subsequently became the focus of burial activity in the late Iron Age and earlier Roman period. Evidence for early to middle Iron Age activity was concentrated on the Clay-with-flints soils of the Weston Hills. It comprised clusters of pits and occasional post-holes which were grouped into a series of activity areas. The pottery recovered hints at a chronological shift from north to south. These activity areas are thought to represent evidence for more permanent settlement, although the actual dwellings are assumed to lie outside the route corridor. Roman boundary ditches and enclosures were found across most of the route corridor. Although evidence is somewhat piecemeal, there does appear to have been a reorganisation of the land boundaries, evidenced by infilling of later Iron Age boundaries and the excavation of new boundaries along a different alignment. Dominating the evidence for the Roman period were two roadways, each displaying a sequence of maintenance and repair. Both roadways lead into the Roman town of Baldock and both were on a similar alignment. A study of the repair sequences and associated finds suggests that a continuing problem of drainage and silting on one road led to the construction of a slightly realigned replacement. Evidence for medieval settlement was confined to the northern portion of the route corridor, and included a rectangular enclosure containing a cemetery, pits and post-holes, with evidence of a hollow way running along the western side of the enclosure. Analysis of documentary evidence strongly suggests that this enclosure can be identified as the 13th-century Hospital of St Mary Magdalene in the parish of Clothall. Woodland clearance along the route appears to have been complete by the early Bronze Age, with the earlier landscape probably a patchwork of woodland, pasture and cultivated fields. This clearance appears to be associated with a reduction in the numbers of pigs kept by the Bronze Age farmers, and the development of a pastoral economy based upon cattle and sheep. Much of the route from later prehistory onwards has been open calcareous grasslands, probably well grazed by sheep, which became increasingly important in the local economy; much of the wealth of medieval Baldock derived from wool.

In the 1980s work began on construction of the vast underground Castle Mall shopping centre in Norwich. The associated archaeological excavation was one of the largest of its kind in northern Europe, designed to investigate not only the castle bailey but also pre-Conquest settlement and, for the post-Conquest period, areas of the surrounding medieval city. Although Parts I and II both contain summary accounts of the faunal remains, setting them into their wider context and including additional information on craft activities, the scale of the data made publication of a separate and more specialised report on the faunal remains desirable and this is published here as Part III.

In the 1980s work began on construction of the vast underground Castle Mall shopping centre in Norwich. The associated archaeological excavation was one of the largest of its kind in northern Europe, designed to investigate not only the castle bailey but also pre-Conquest settlement and, for the post-Conquest period, areas of the surrounding medieval city. Documentary evidence that supplements the substantial data presented in the monograph (parts I and II) forms Part IV (EAA occasional paper 23), published separately because of the scale of the data and because it forms a rounded resource in its own right. It provides additional data on medieval and later properties around the entire circuit of the Castle Fee, permitting ease of access to information that might otherwise have been obscured within the complexity of the integrated monograph.