‘Find of the century’: a medieval hoard of treasures unearthed in Cambridge

A mediaeval graveyard with an excess of unidentified graves being uncovered underneath student accommodation in Cambridge University is listed as being one of the most exciting discoveries of Anglo-Saxon archaeology since the 19th century.

After demolishing a group of 1930s buildings that had recently housed graduates and employees in the west of the city, King’s College discovered the “extensive” cemetery, containing more than 60 graves, to make way for more modern halls.

Many objects (around 200 items) have been found in the graves, including bronze brooches, bead necklaces, knives, small blades, pottery and glass bottles.

Most date from the early Anglo-Saxon period from 400 to 650, although evidence of iron-age structures and Roman earthworks has also been found. Caroline Goodson, who teaches early medieval history at King’s College, said the human remains they found were remarkably “well-preserved.”

“The alkaline soil, which is typical around here, hasn’t decomposed the bones,” she said.

This is significant because it would enable archaeologists to apply modern scientific techniques to reveal the diet and DNA of the dead, permitting analysis of migration and family relationships.

Goodson said excavators had been “surprised” to find so many graves and such an extensive early medieval cemetery surrounded by Roman ditches and so close to the remains of Roman Cambridge.

According to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was written in the eighth century, Cambridge was abandoned — like many other Roman towns — when the Romans withdrew their military forces from England during the fifth century.

“We already know that Cambridge wasn’t fully abandoned. But what we’re seeing now is a greater and clearer picture of life in the post-Roman settlements,” she said.

Goodson speculated that people living in Cambridgeshire were a mix of descendants from earlier Roman populations and recent migrants to Britain from the continent, living in a post-imperial world.

“They are no longer living as the Romans did, they’re eating differently, dressing differently and finding different ways of exploiting the land. They are changing the way they are living during a period of considerable fluidity,” Goodson said.

Some of the finds throw up questions about the emotional connections people living at the time of the burials might have felt toward the Romans who lived in Cambridge before them.

In one grave, archaeologists found a body buried with what appears to be a late Roman piece of glass shaped like a small barrel for storing wine.

“It looks like a classic Roman object being reused in a post-Roman context, as grave goods,” Goodson said.

Another grave looks like a typical late Roman burial from the fifth century, suggesting there might have been continuity of use of the burial ground from the Roman period onward.

Archaeologists have so far not found “strong evidence” that people living in the sixth century were still choosing to bury their dead near late Roman graves, but few graveyards of this size have ever been scientifically excavated using modern methods and technologies, such as advanced radiocarbon dating techniques and isotopic analysis.

“It would be great to say very clearly — and we’re going to need an ample suite of carbon-14 dates to do this — that we’ve got people using this site from the fifth until the seventh century,” Goodson said. “We can see that the burial of the dead and the treatment of their bodies is particularly significant to living in a way that is different from elsewhere in the post-Roman world.”

That points to a different world view and a different “cosmology”: “It’s a new form of commemoration,” she said.

She hoped to find out whether anyone in the cemetery died of the Justinianic Plague, a pandemic that raged across Europe in the 540s.

Archaeologists unearth bronze age graves at Stonehenge tunnel site

New items discovered near the proposed road tunnel underneath Stonehenge could shed light on the makers of the famous stone circle. Early discoveries include various graves dating back to the Bronze Age as well as two burial pits of Beaker people, who arrived in Britain around 4,500 years ago after Stonehenge was erected in the late Neolithic period around 5,000 years ago. 

The findings have thus far not provided any insight into who may have built Stonehenge, or how they may have done it, but researchers believe ongoing excavations could help unpick some of the mystery surrounding the monument.  Small finds uncovered at the site pertain mostly to everyday life and allow experts to build a clearer image of life pre-and post-erection of Stonehenge, which could help inform future studies and theories about its origin. 

Wessex Archaeology is leading hundreds of trial digs around the site to ensure the construction work, due to start in 2023, does not destroy any archaeological items. 

‘We’ve found a lot – evidence about the people who lived in this landscape over millennia, traces of people’s everyday lives and deaths, intimate things,’ Matt Leivers, A303 Stonehenge consultant archaeologist at Wessex Archaeology told The Guardian.

Every detail lets us work out what was happening in that landscape before during and after the building of Stonehenge. Every piece brings that picture into a little more focus. Objects from the Neolithic period were also found scattered around the site, including chunks of pottery, flint, and red deer antlers.  It is possible these items were left by the same people who built Stonehenge, but the archaeologists are currently unavailable to prove this. 

One discovery of note is a cylindrical piece of shale that was found in a 4,000-year-old Beaker burial. It has been described by archaeologists as ‘an oddity’ and unique.  The item is thought to have sat atop a staff or mace and was inside the grave of an adult who was also interred in a crouched position with a small pot and a copper awl.

Nearby to this pit was the burial site of a young child from the same period of time.   All that remains of the youngster are the inner ear bones and the baby was buried in a plain pot, which was likely a grave good for the deceased.  This bland Beaker pot is unusual for the culture, which is known for its ornate items. The simplicity likely reflects the age of the person who was buried there, the experts believe. 

The Beaker sites were found near the Western portal of the proposed tunnel, which sits south of the Stonehenge visitor center.  Even further south the team of archaeologists discovered an unusual arrangement of C-shaped ditches, and their use remains unknown. 

It is a strange pattern of ditches,’ Mr Leivers told The Guardian.  It’s difficult to say what it was, but we know how old it is because we found a near-complete bronze age pot in one of the ditches. The excavation also revealed large amounts of burnt flint in the ditches, which could indicate an industrial purpose. Mr. Leivers says this could be related to metal, leatherworking, pottery, or crops. 

Digs at the earmarked location for the Eastern portal of the tunnel have revealed fewer items, but they themselves have intrigued archaeologists.  One dig found evidence of debnitage, the waste material produced when making flint tools. Ditches in the area have also been found which date to the Iron Age and may be connected to the nearby Vespasian’s Camp, a hillfort located to the south.  

All items unearthed so far are being stored temporarily in nearby Salisbury and will eventually go on display at the city’s museum.  The controversial £1.7billion tunnel project is designed to divert traffic away from the iconic site by removing the current stretch of the A303 which passes within a few hundred yards of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

Traffic will be sent underground and into the new dual-carriageway tunnel network, which will be 164ft further away from the site than the current road, in a bid to ease congestion around the landmark. 

The current road will become a public footpath.  Environmentalists, archaeologists, and druids have been outraged at the plans, which were first unveiled in 2017, and a legal battle was mounted last year.   

Highways England says its plan for the dual carriageway tunnel, located 164ft further away from Stonehenge compared to the existing A303 route, will remove the sight and sound of traffic passing the site and cut journey times.

The area is often severely congested on the single carriageway stretch near the stones, particularly on Bank Holiday weekends. But some environmentalists and archaeologists have voiced their opposition to the plan due to its potential impact on the area.

Modern-day druids, who each year celebrate the winter and summer solstices at Stonehenge, have also hit out at the plans. As a result, huge amounts of archaeological preparation is being conducted by Wessex, renowned leaders and experts in commercial excavations, 

They have recently revealed the ‘Hampton Court of Warwickshire’ as well as a 19th-century Victorian bathhouse in Bath. The experts drafted in specialists to hand dig and sift through more than 2,000 test pits and trenches. Next, the company intends to bring in 150 archaeologists to clear a larger swath of the land later this year. 

Construction work on the tunnel is expected to start in 2023, and Andy Crockett, A303 project director for Wessex Archaeology, acknowledges it is impossible to mitigate all risk to an area’s archaeology when road projects are involved. 

Highways England says the unprecedented amount of surveying done on the area is due to the significance of the Stonehenge site. David Bullock, A303 project manager for Highways England, told The Guardian: ‘There has been a huge amount of investigations so that this route can be threaded through so as to disturb as little as possible.’   

Researchers Find 320 Million-Year-Old Plant Root Stem Cells

It may look more like a shiny mosaic or a piece of jewellery, but the world’s oldest plant stem cells contain a 320 million-year-old fossil. And it gives us an entirely new understanding of the evolution of how plants grow.

The fossil shows that the way plants grew from their roots millions of years ago was totally different from the way many modern plants form. Stem cells, self-renewing cells responsible for the development of multicellular organisms, in groups called meristems, are present in plants at the tips of shoots and roots.

Scientists at Oxford University have discovered the oldest known population of plant root stem cells in a 320 million-year-old fossil. The researchers found the 320 million-year-old stem cells are different to all those living today, revealing a unique pattern of cell division that had remained unknown until now.

This means some of the mechanisms controlling root formation in plants and trees back then have now become extinct.

The fossils were the remains of the soil from the first giant tropical rainforests on Earth. These fossils made up the rooting structures of the plants growing in the Earth’s first global tropical wetland forests.

The cells, which gave rise to the roots of an ancient plant, were found in a fossilized root tip held in the Oxford University Herbaria – a preserved selection of plants kept for scientists to study.

‘I was examining one of the fossilized soil slides held at the University Herbaria as part of my research into the rooting systems of ancient trees when I noticed a structure that looked like the living root tips we see in plants today,’  said Alexander Hetherington, from Oxford University, who made the discovery during the course of his research.

‘I began to realize that I was looking at a population of 320 million-year-old plant stem cells preserved as they were growing – and that it was the first time anything like this had ever been found.

‘It gives us a unique window into how roots developed hundreds of millions of years ago.’ This is the first time an actively growing fossilized root has been discovered.

The soil was preserved in the rock that formed in the Carboniferous swamps which gave rise to the coal sources spanning what is now Appalachia to central Europe.

This includes the coalfields in Wales, northern England, and Scotland. Because of this, Mr. Hetherington has named the stem-cell fossil Radix carbonica, which is Latin for ‘coal root’.

The forests had trees over 164 feet (50 meters) tall, and were in part responsible for one of the most dramatic climate change events in history.

When deep rooting systems evolved, this increased the rate of chemical weathering of silicate minerals in rocks – a chemical reaction that pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. This led to the cooling of the Earth and one of the planet’s great ice ages.

Professor Liam Dolan, Head of the Department of Plant Sciences at Oxford University and senior author of the paper, said ‘these fossils demonstrate how the roots of these ancient plants grew for the first time.

‘It is startling that something so small could have had such a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate.

‘This discovery also shows the importance of collections such as the Oxford University Herbaria – they are so valuable, and we need to maintain them for future generations.’

4-Year-Old Girl Finds Dinosaur Footprint On Beach In Wales

A four-year-old girl, walking while vacationing with her family in Wales, found a very well preserved, and probably a new trace of dinosaur tracks. The footprints found are from an extinct species of crocodilians, extinct ancestors of modern crocodiles.

The dinosaur that made the print probably stood 30 inches (75 centimeters) tall and 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) long. Its 4-inch (10 cm) track looks similar to that of the dinosaur Coelophysis, though that particular species lived in North America, not what is now Europe. 

Lily Wilder, a preschooler on a stroll with her father at Bendricks Bay, discovered the track.

“It was Lily and Richard (her father) who discovered the footprint,” Lily’s mother Sally Wilder said in a statement. “Lily saw it as they were walking along, and said ‘Daddy look.’

When Richard came home and showed me the photograph, I thought it looked amazing. Richard thought it was too good to be true. I was put in touch with experts who took it from there.”

The print was on a loose rock and has now been removed to National Museum Wales (Amgueddfa Cymru in Welsh) with permission from Natural Resources Wales, the government-sponsored body that regulates conservation and environmental issues. 

“This fossilized dinosaur footprint from 220 million years ago is one of the best-preserved examples from anywhere in the U.K. and will really aid paleontologists to get a better idea about how these early dinosaurs walked,” Cindy Howells, the paleontology curator at the museum, said in the statement. 

The fossil is so detailed that the claws and pads of the feet are visible. The print is a type known as a grallator, meaning a bipedal theropod dinosaur with three toes created it.

The dinosaur lived at the beginning of the Triassic period when the region was a desert dotted with occasional saline lakes.

Dinosaurs had evolved only about 10 million years before this mysterious three-toed creature walked this landscape, so its print is a tantalizing clue into early dinosaur history, according to National Museum Wales.

“During the COVID pandemic, scientists from Amgueddfa Cymru have been highlighting the importance of nature on people’s doorstep, and this is a perfect example of this,” Howells said. “Obviously, we don’t all have dinosaur footprints on our doorstep, but there is a wealth of nature local to you if you take the time to really look close enough.”

Why is the area important?

The Bendricks is a stretch of coastline between Barry and Sully in the Vale of Glamorgan. It is an important paleontologist site and a site of special scientific interest. The south Wales group of the Geologists’ Association called it “the best site in Britain for dinosaur tracks of the Triassic Period”.

It said: “The footprints can be difficult to see. Many are covered at high tide so it is best to go after high tide when the tracks may retain small puddles of water.

“It is also easier to spot the footprints when the sun is low in the sky as longer shadows will help throw the footprints into relief.

Archaeologists on HS2 line uncover grounds of perfectly preserved 16th-century manor gardens

The remains of beautiful gardens belonging to a 16th-century manor house have been uncovered by archaeologists clearing ground for the high-speed HS2 rail line. The finding, near Coleshill on the outskirts of Birmingham, has been dubbed ‘Warwickshire’s answer to Hampton Court’.

Through a continuous excavation alongside the ruins of Coleshill Manor and its octagonal moat, which were first picked up by archaeologists two years ago, evidence of the large ornamental garden was discovered. Sir Robert Digby, who owned the house in its heyday, is thought to have married an Irish heiress and designed the 1,000 feet (300 m) long gardens to display his wealth and status.

HS2 and its archaeologist partners Wessex Archaeology have now released drone images of the area showing the outline of the enormous garden. Stunning aerial photos show well-preserved gravel paths, planting beds, garden pavilion foundations, and ornaments organized in a geometric pattern.

The 500-year-old site has drawn comparisons to London’s Hampton Court Palace and Kenilworth Castle and has been described as ‘one of the most exciting Elizabethan gardens’ ever found in England. Dr. Paul Stamper is a specialist in English gardens and landscape history and works at the University of Leicester.

He said: ‘This is one of the most exciting Elizabethan gardens that’s ever been discovered in this country.

‘The scale of preservation at this site is really exceptional and is adding considerably to our knowledge of English gardens around 1600.

‘There have only been three or four investigations of gardens of this scale over the last 30 years, including Hampton Court, Kirby in Northamptonshire, and Kenilworth Castle, but this one was entirely unknown.

‘The garden doesn’t appear in historical records, there are no plans of it, it’s not mentioned in any letters or visitors’ accounts.

‘The form of the gardens suggest they were designed around 1600, which fits in exactly with the documentary evidence we have about the Digby family that lived here.

‘Sir Robert Digby married an Irish heiress, raising him to the ranks of the aristocracy.

‘We suspect he rebuilt his house and laid out the huge formal gardens measuring 300 meters from end to end, signifying his wealth.’

HS2’s Historic Environment Manager, Jon Millward said: ‘It’s fantastic to see HS2’s huge archaeology programme making another major contribution to our understanding of British history.

‘This is an incredibly exciting site, and the team has made some important new discoveries that unlock more of Britain’s past.’

Wessex Archaeology’s Project Officer, Stuart Pierson added: ‘For the dedicated fieldwork team working on this site, it’s a once in a career opportunity to work on such an extensive garden and manor site, which spans 500 years.

‘Evidence of expansive formal gardens of national significance and hints of connections to Elizabeth I and the civil war provide us with a fascinating insight into the importance of Coleshill and its surrounding landscape.

‘From our original trench evaluation work, we knew there were gardens, but we had no idea how extensive the site would be.

‘As work has progressed, it’s been particularly interesting to discover how the gardens have been changed and adapted over time with different styles.

‘We’ve also uncovered structures such as pavilions and some exceptional artifacts including smoking pipes, coins, and musket balls, giving us an insight into the lives of people who lived here.

‘The preservation of the gardens is unparalleled.

‘We’ve had a big team of up to 35 archaeologists working on this site over the last two years conducting trench evaluations, geophysical work, and drone surveys as well as the archaeological excavations.’

Evidence of the manor, known as Coleshill Hall, and its previous occupants point towards a great feud between the Digby family and their rivals, the famed de Montfort clan, who now have a university named after them.

The hall came into the hands of Simon Digby in the late 15th century and the change of ownership set in motion huge alterations to the landscape around Coleshill and the hall, including a deer park and the formal gardens.

Excavations have revealed structures dating to the late medieval period, with evidence of a large gatehouse alluding to a possible 14th or 15th-century date.

‘Britain’s Atlantis’ found at bottom of North sea – a huge undersea world swallowed by the sea in 7000BC

Doggerland was a region of land that connected Great Britain to mainland Europe before and during the last Ice Age. It was then gradually flooded by rising sea levels around 6,500–6,200 BCE. Geological surveys have suggested that it stretched from Britain’s east coast to the Netherlands and the western coasts of Germany and the peninsula of Jutland.

In the Mesolithic period, it was possibly a rich human habitat, but rising sea levels eventually reduced it to low-lying islands until its final destruction, perhaps following a tsunami caused by the Storegga Slide.

The archaeological potential of the area had first been discussed in the early 20th century, but interest intensified in 1931 when a commercial trawler operating between the sandbanks and shipping hazards of the Leman Bank and Ower Bank east of Wash dragged up a barbed antler point that dated to a time when the area was tundra. Vessels have dragged up remains of a mammoth, lion and other land animals, and small numbers of prehistoric tools and weapons.

British scientists and researchers have recently started using 4D technology to explore the remains of an area inhabited before sea levels destroyed it over 7,000 years ago.  Historians believe that the area spanned over 100,000 square miles and was home to dozens of prehistoric Britons. 

It was once known as Doggerland.  Using 4D technology, researchers will show how Doggerland was colonized and inhabited before being washed away.  The researchers like to call this area “Britain’s Atlantis”.

Over the years, experts from Bradford and Nottingham have worked on the multi-million pound 4D project.  With the tool, they hope to find evidence of flint tools, animal DNA, and pollen from plants.  One of the researchers working on the project, Mr. Vince Gaffney, says that he hopes the 4D tool will find something so other researchers can use the information.

Historians believe that Doggerland was submerged sometime between the years of 18,000 and 5,500 BC. 

The area was just recently found by divers in the area; they were doing research three years ago to find more oil resources when they discovered the remains of the other world.

Some historians believe that this area could have been home to thousands of people and was most likely once the heartland of Europe. After the divers’ discovery, climatologists, archaeologists, and geophysicists mapped the area and found out this Atlantis stretched from Denmark to Scotland.

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Until the middle Pleistocene, Britain was a peninsula of Europe, connected by a massive chalk anticline, the Weald–Artois Anticline across the Straits of Dover. During the Anglian glaciation, approximately 450,000 years ago, an ice sheet filled much of the North Sea, with a large proglacial lake in the southern part fed by the Rhine, Scheldt, and Thames river systems.

The catastrophic overflow of this lake carved a channel through the anticline, leading to the formation of the Channel River, which carried the combined Scheldt and Thames rivers into the Atlantic. It probably created the potential for Britain to become isolated from the continent during periods of high sea level, although some scientists argue that the final break did not occur until a second ice-dammed lake overflowed during the MIS8 or MIS6 glaciations, around 340,000 or 240,000 years ago.

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During the most recent glaciation, the Last Glacial Maximum that ended in this area around 18,000 years ago, the North Sea and almost all of the British Isles were covered with glacial ice and the sea level was about 120 m (390 ft) lower than it is today.

After that, the climate became warmer and during the Late Glacial Maximum much of the North Sea and the English Channel was an expanse of low-lying tundra, around 12,000 BC extending to the modern northern point of Scotland

With the new technology, there is now research on two more North Sea valleys being led by Mr. Gaffney.  The project is funded by a European grant.

Mr. Gaffney and his team hope to use remote sensing data to reconstruct the ancient landscape.  Besides this research, the team hopes to get some core sediment samples from the landscape to eventually create a map showing rivers, lakes, hills, and coastlines.

After the area slowly started sinking into the water, a storm surged and the sea levels rose abruptly, creating an island around 6,500 BC.  One thousand years after the first storm, the whole island was then submerged and lost.

The team hopes to learn more about the lifestyles of the territories.  One researcher from Wales says that the project will let the team look into the ways of the people and also what it was like to live in the Mesolithic period. 

The new 4D technology will open up new doors for researchers and historians to find out more about territories, colonies, and people from thousands of years in the past.

The Extraordinary Discovery of a 1,000-Year-Old Chinese Coin in the UK May Give Proof of a Global Medieval Trade Route

A newly discovered medieval Chinese coin, the second ever found in England, points to the possible existence of a vast medieval trade route spanning much of the Eastern hemisphere.

Discovered via a metal detector in a field in Hampshire, the copper-alloy coin dates to the Northern Song dynasty, between 1008 and 1016, and would have likely circulated through the 14th century, according to the Times.

The find follows the discovery of a similar coin, dated from 1068 and 1077, in Cheshire in 2018.

“If they did arrive at some point in the medieval period, then they would help illustrate the existence of very long-distance, indirect trading networks and contacts in this era,” Cambridge historian and archaeologist Caitlin Green, who wrote a blog post about the find, told Artnet News in an email.

When the Chinese coin first turned up, researchers at the British Museum wrote that “it is doubtful that this is a genuine medieval find (i.e. present in the country due to trade and lost accidentally) but more likely a more recent loss from a curated collection.”

But now that there’s been a second discovery of a similar nature, Green believes that conclusion has been called into question, and that the case for medieval trade links between China and the UK has become much more convincing—especially since both coins turned up in areas where medieval and early post-medieval material has previously been discovered.

“We have only a handful of finds of material from East Asia from pre-modern England,” Green said. “But interestingly, one of the other pieces is a piece of imported Chinese pottery from a 14th-century excavated context at Winchester, which is only 20 miles from the new coin find.”

And Green has found other evidence of exchange between the two distant lands. There are historical accounts of Englishmen in the Mongol empire in the 13th century, and of Mongol envoys visiting England in 1264. Antique Chinese artifacts have also been found in other parts of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Nevertheless, Green cautioned that these discoveries may have made their way to the UK in more recent times, especially since these were “metal-detected finds and not excavated from sealed archaeological contexts.”

“If there’s no other context, I’d suggest it’s just a random coin-find,” Helen Wang, who identified the coin for the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, told the organization.

“Chinese coins were taken on ships from China to [southeast] Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, so this coin could have come that way (at any date after 1008) or fallen out of a pocket not so long ago.”

4,000 Years old Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Cemetery Unearthed in England

The Northampton Chronicle & Echo reports that an Anglo-Saxon settlement and cemetery, and Bronze Age barrows and burials, were discovered in England’s East Midlands during an archaeological investigation conducted by researchers from the Museum of London Archaeology ahead of a development project.

Traces of more than 20 structures were unearthed at the Anglo-Saxon settlement site. Weapons, cosmetic kits, combs, thousands of beads, some 150 brooches, 75 wrist clasps, and 15 chatelaines were recovered from the more than 150 Anglo-Saxon burials. 

The site was excavated as part of pre-construction planning requirements at Overstone Farm where Barratt and David Wilson homes intend to build two to five-bedroom homes, a school and amenities, as part of a new housing development.

Jewellery, weapons and more were found.

An archaeology firm – Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) – was appointed and over the course of 12 months, the archaeologists undertook detailed excavation and recording across a total of 15 hectares.

The work revealed 154 Anglo-Saxon burials, many containing grave goods including weapons, beads and brooches. Simon Markus, project manager at MoLA, said: “The Overstone site contains by far the biggest Anglo-Saxon cemetery ever found in Northamptonshire.

“It is also rare to find both an Anglo-Saxon settlement and a cemetery in a single excavation.

An overview of the site in Overstone.

“The excavations will help us understand the way people lived in both the Anglo- Saxon period, around 1,500 years ago as well as the Bronze Age, nearly 4,000 years ago.

“The human remains will tell us about diet, health and even the origins of the people themselves whilst their buildings can teach us what their day-to-day lives were like and how they utilised the local landscape in these two different periods.”

Jewellery found on the site included roughly 150 brooches, 15 rings, 2,000 beads, 75 wrist clasps and 15 chatelaines – decorative belt hooks.

Other findings included weapons such as spears and shields and everyday items like cosmetic kits and combs.

The site also contains a previously unknown Anglo-Saxon settlement of 22 structures, with 20 more Anglo-Saxon buildings scattered around the site, together with earlier prehistoric evidence including three Bronze Age round barrows, 46 prehistoric burials, and four Bronze Age buildings.

John Dillion, managing director at Barratt and David Wilson Homes South Midlands, said: “We’re blown away by the findings at our site in Overstone and have enjoyed learning more about what the land was previously used for.

“It is amazing to think that settlers have been building homes on this site for around 4,000 years, and we hope to continue this long-standing tradition with our new and already flourishing community.”

All of the findings from the excavations have been removed from the site and are now being analysed by MOLA’s specialist teams.