Land East of Eagle Business Park, Yaxley. An Archaeological Excavation

Abstract

An archaeological investigation comprising four areas of excavation was undertaken by Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) between 24th January 2018 and 23rdFebruary 2018 on Land East of Eagle Business Park, Yaxley, in advance of proposeddevelopment by Barnack Estates UK Ltd.The excavation followed on from an evaluation in December 2017. Areas A, B, and C were designed to target three key areas of activity revealed and sample excavated in the evaluation: a burnt mound feature (the focus of Area B, identified in evaluation Trench 4); Middle Bronze Age boundary ditches (Area A, identified in evaluation Trench 6); a possible Bronze Age pit alignment and associated activity (Area C,identified in Trenches 7, 8, 25 and 26). Area D was opened between Area A and Area C with the agreement of the Cambridge Historic Environment Team (CHET) to identify any continuity of activity between the two areas, in particular the extents of the boundary ditches, but exposed no archaeological features.The excavation revealed three Early Bronze Age burnt mounds sealing buried soils with associated post-built structures and pits, situated on a low-lying northwest southeast slope around the northwest edge of a possible paleochannel. The “possible pit alignment”(Robinson Zeki 2017) was demonstrated to be a Middle Bronze Age segmented enclosure ditch, with Middle Bronze Age and Early Iron Age pittingoutside of the enclosure. Further ditches, pits, and postholes were revealed and excavated.The prehistoric activity investigated in these excavations is directly comparable with evidence from nearby sites and other fen-edge locations such as Stanground South (Taylor et al. 2011) and Bradley Fen (Gibson and Knight 2006).