I head east, in this column, to Lincolnshire and the origins of Current Archaeology. The Welland River Project featured in no less an issue than CA 1, back in March 1967, and was also the first fieldwork mentioned by the magazine, following directly on from the introductory editorial. The magazine thus began its now 54-year (and counting) run by diving headfirst into the Fens, examining work undertaken there between 1962 and 1966 that produced a great panorama of prehistoric, Roman, and early medieval settlements. CA returned to this area in issue 160 (November 1998), when regular contributor Francis Pryor wrote of his work at Welland Bank Quarry, a spectacular multi-period prehistoric site just north of Peterborough. For those of you interested in other large-scale surveys of the county, the magazine has provided excellent summaries over the years, specifically of the Lincolnshire Fens in the prehistoric and early medieval periods: see CA 172 (February 2001) and CA 332 (November 2017).
Industries of salt and iron
The salterns of the Lincolnshire coast, which have been proven to date back as far as the Middle Bronze Age, featured in CA 350 (May 2019), when Chris Catling toured some of the sites and finds that feature in Tom Lane’s book Mineral from the Marshes: Coastal Salt-making in Lincolnshire. A specific salt-making site in the area made an appearance, too, much earlier in the magazine’s history, in CA 136 (December 1993), when a new Bronze Age discovery made at Tetney, near Cleethorpes, was one of the earliest such sites identified in the entire country.
