Niche bunching and the inland sea: settlement at Over and River Great Ouse distributions

Abstract

The implications of the Fenland Region’s ‘Inland Sea’ – the third and earlier second millennium BC marine inundations – upon its prehistoric communities are not widely appreciated (Evans 2015a; see, also, Sturt, 2006).¹ Drowning vast tracts of its lowlands, this would have severely impacted human and animal populations, pushing them inland. The arising bunching of both in the taidal limits of river valleys is a theme explored in the context of the Barleycroft/Over excavations in Cambridgeshire and their many period ‘occupations’. The issues raised resonate with the origins of Grooved Ware and the submerged landscape studies of the 'Essex Coast Sub-Committee of the Fenland Research Committee' (Hazzledine Warren et al. 1936; Wilson et al. 1971).

Developing from out of the 1980’s Haddenham Project, occurring just south of the Old West River and the Upper Delphs great causewayed enclosure (Evans and Hodder 2006), over nearly 30 years Over’s on-going fieldwork programme has progressed across Hanson's Needingworth Quarry lands (Fig. 9.1). It has extended across the mid-stream islands and the both terrace-sides of the River Great Ouse where it debouches into the fen marshlands. Its over-arching research directive has been the changing status of major river in prehistory – when primarily a communications corridor and when a socio-territory divide? – with how the mid-stream islands were utilised, as opposed to the riverside terraces, also a priority.² Of the Grooved Ware sites related here, those on the northern island-ridges – The Narrows – featured in the project’s first, Twice-crossed River (Evans et al. 2016; herafter TCR), with the southern islands’ appearing in the next, A Book of Sites (completed, it will be issued shortly).

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ORCID for Joshua Pollard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-2009

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