Excavating Cambridgeshire

Cambridgeshire

The story of Cambridgeshire’s coverage in Current Archaeology is an exceptionally rich one. In undertaking my background research for this latest column, I had my pick of sites spanning prehistory to the 20th century, right up to the excavation of a crashed Second World War Spitfire featured in CA 312 (March 2016). That issue also had one of the best-known prehistoric sites in the county on its front cover – that of Must Farm, a real superstar site to which I will return in a moment. There are several large-scale surveys, too, of projects that have impacted widely on our understanding of the county’s archaeology, most notably that in CA 339 (June 2018), when improvement works along the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon allowed archaeologists to investigate the landscape on a vast scale.

Finds and fury among the Fens

I have previously told the story of perhaps the most celebrated site in the county: Flag Fen, near Peterborough (CA 336, March 2018). That site, along with the similarly dated Must Farm – see CA 263 (February 2012), CA 312 (March 2016), and CA 319 (October 2016) – speaks to the extraordinary prehistoric riches that lie beneath the Fenlands to the north of the county. The ‘pre-prehistory’ of the archaeology of Flag Fen is worth examining for those interested in our discipline’s origin stories, for before Flag Fen there was the Fengate Project, which featured in, among others, CA 17 (November 1969), CA 46 (September 1974), and CA 56 (May 1976). You can also enjoy a wide-ranging review of Francis Pryor’s work around the Peterborough area in our celebratory special edition (CA 300, March 2015).

Beyond these most-famous sites and names, though, there is much more to reveal. The Fens hold many secrets, and CA 172 (a ‘wetland archaeology’ special from February 2001), CA 325 (on ‘fenland rituals’; April 2017), and CA 332 (on Anglo-Saxon settlement in the area; November 2017) are all worth a read if this particular landscape and locale is your preference. Similar prehistoric sites of note also featured in CA 264 (March 2012), examining the appropriately named Clay Farm Bronze Age complex to the south of Cambridge, while right up on the Cambridgeshire–Northamptonshire border lies Maxey: a huge Neolithic henge, 126m in diameter, that was part of a local landscape of such features, including at nearby Etton (see CA 96, April 1985). Current Archaeology paid repeated visits to Pryor’s fieldwork at Maxey across the 1970s, including in issues 18 (January 1970), 45 (July 1974), 49 (March 1975), and 77 (May 1981). In stark contrast, the magazine featured a very different Fenland news story in issues 258 (September 2011) and 260 (November 2011), when the then-leader of the local council, Alan Melton, challenged the requirement for archaeology to be undertaken within the planning system, a story that briefly hit the national press when he commented that: ‘The bunny huggers won’t like this, but if they wish to inspect a site, they can do it when the footings are being dug out’.