A book of sites: River Great Ouse floodplain and mid-stream islands investigations

Evans, Christopher, Pollard, Joshua and Haughton, Mark (2026) A book of sites: River Great Ouse floodplain and mid-stream islands investigations , Cambridge. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 709pp.

Abstract

This ‘Book of Sites’ spans 16 years of fieldwork and 21 sites upon Barleycroft Farm’s eastern terrace and Over’s southern River Great Ouse mid-stream islands. In it issues of sampling methodology, and analytical approaches to landscape and the distribution of the area’s many settlements, are foregrounded. Three Early Bronze Age ring-ditches and two barrows were excavated. The primary cremation of one of the latter included ‘selected’ plants and plant-fibre textiles, with the other – attesting to acts of ‘monument erasure’ – starting as a later Neolithic oval barrow, reworked as an Early Bronze Age pond barrow and subsequently infilled with Middle-period midden deposits.
Substantial Early, Middle and Late Neolithic ‘occupations’ were recovered. Arguably amounting to settlement ‘bunching’, those of Grooved Ware attribution were particularly dense. Having structural and ritual settings, one included a ‘shaman’s pit’ involving a placed human skull rung with antlers and with deadly nightshade (a ‘flying’ drug) amongst its plant remains. Four Middle Bronze Age fieldsystem ‘blocks’ are detailed, with two accompanied by cremation cemeteries. Another two had substantial settlements associated, including longhouses. Otherwise, amongst the programme’s ‘extraordinaries’ were a large Early Bronze Age enclosure and an array of Late-period post alignment ‘viewshed frames’.
  The volume’s scope extends beyond the immediate area’s findings. There are River Great Ouse and southern Cambridgeshire distributional studies, and further afield still, the character of riverine mid-stream island archaeology is considered more widely.

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Contributors

Author: Joshua Pollard

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