Located close to Arundel in bucolic Sussex, the villages of Burpham and Wepham have classic Anglo-Saxon names – but their residents recently helped to uncover a story stretching far before and beyond the early medieval period. In 2024 and 2025, Worthing Museum partnered with Worthing Archaeological Society (WAS) and local volunteers to carry out a major series of excavations within Burpham parish, digging more than 30 test-pits in private gardens and opening five large trenches over the enigmatic defensive ditch of the promontory fort that gives Burpham its name. These combined efforts recovered 17,000 artefacts, helping to tell a new history of how both villages developed – though the earliest finds from the Burpham Big Dig date to a period long before humans called this area home.
These were a series of fossils – sea urchins and sponges – from the Cretaceous chalk on which the Downland parish sits. The presence of these marine species highlights how much the landscape has changed since they lived 70 million years ago – and, in fact, it is likely that at least some of the fossils may have been found higher up on the Downs and brought back by curious locals before they were lost in garden plots, providing a tangible link between the area’s distant and much more recent past.
The oldest human-made finds, meanwhile, were flint tools, including tiny microliths, from the Mesolithic period. They speak of early hunter-gatherers moving through the riverine landscape around Burpham, hunting game and fowl and probably (though we have no direct evidence from the Big Dig) using traps to catch fish and eels in the Arun. The largest number of worked flints, though, dates to the Neolithic, demonstrating that the earliest farmers in Britain were present here c.6,000 years ago, clearing woodland for their livestock to graze. A particularly fine find from the parish is a pristine Neolithic flaked axe, which was discovered during a field-walking survey in 2025. Its raw material was almost certainly extracted from the chalk at one of the substantial flint-mining complexes that are known to have operated on the Downs above Worthing, just 2 miles (3km) to the east (see CA 389).
Raksha Dave on the future of archaeology