SNN111345 - Archaeological mitigation at Dallington Gateway, Harlestone Road, Northampton August to October 2014

Between August and October 2014 MOLA Northampton carried out archaeological mitigation on land at Dallington Gateway, Harlestone Road, Northampton. The earliest feature was a posthole dated to the late Neolithic by a small Grooved ware assemblage. A scatter of worked flint, largely residual in later features such as the pit alignment, broadly spans the early Neolithic to early Bronze Age, and suggests that the nearby causewayed enclosure acted as a focal point for activity extending up to 1.1km away from the monument. Double posthole lines forming an avenue 3m wide and at least 60m long are undated, but a Neolithic to early Bronze Age date seems most likely. Fragments of a system of shallow and narrow linear ditches may be remnants of a middle to late Bronze Age field system. Parts of a rectangular double-ditch enclosure and an adjacent circular enclosure are also undated. A 193m length of a pit alignment was examined, with every pit investigated. Although many pits had heavily eroded upper edges, indicating that they had slowly silted, the sharply squared bases indicate that originally the alignment had comprised only rectangular pits. In some places the closely-spaced pits became interlinked through erosion. The small pottery assemblage from the secondary fills of the pits suggests a date at the transition from early to middle Iron Age, perhaps the mid-5th to mid-4th centuries BC.