Abstract

The talk will focus on archaeological investigations carried out between 2004-10 on the lower valley slopes of the River Granta at Linton Village College, which revealed features and finds representing some four and a half thousand years of settlement, farming and ceremonial use of this Granta Valley landscape. Highlights include Late Neolithic Grooved Ware pits, remnants of two Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age barrows, a Middle to Late Bronze Age enclosure, traces of Middle/later Iron Age settlement, a Roman trackway and field system, and a small group of Middle Saxon burials – a possible execution cemetery. Furthermore, five Roman graves including the richly-furnished burial of a child were found at the village college site in the 1930s. The results (to be published as a monograph in the East Anglian Archaeology reports series) will be discussed within the context and topography of the site’s valley setting, within a boundary zone between three topographically and perhaps culturally distinct regions in eastern England, which has no doubt played a role in its development and in the character of the archaeology that has survived.