Persimmon Homes (East Midlands) Ltd. has commissioned this archaeological study into an area of land in Ely purchased for housing development. The study was requested as part of general investigation programme by the Development Control Office (DCO) of Cambridgeshire County Council's Archaeology Section. It forms the first part of a two-tiered approach designed to evaluate a 4.76 hectare block of land in north-eastern Ely ahead of construction work for a new housing development. It will attempt to indicate the potential for archaeological site presence as predicted from research into the known archaeological background held within a radius of 0.5km of the development area. The Brief prepared by the DCO had originally requested the study and rectification of air photographs to aid in both the prospection of archaeological sites and/or to discover whether elements of sites close by would enter the new investigation area. A recent land evaluation in an area immediately adjacent included air photographic rectification, the results of which indicated that no archaeological features could be mapped from existing photographs. Further work was, therefore, dropped from this study.