SNN114955 - Hanwood Park Plots R25 and E3 (formerly East Kettering Sustainable Urban Expansion): Post Excavation Assessment and Updated Project Design (Updated January 2023)

Between 3rd March and 11th September 2020 Oxford Archaeology East (OA East) carried out an area of excavation at Plots R25 and E3, East Kettering. This c.2.6ha site forms part of the 350ha Hanwood Park development (formerly East Kettering Sustainable Urban Extension). Plot E3 could not be accessed until July 2022. The results of Plot E3 have been integrated with those of the original excavation in this updated report. OA East was commissioned to undertake the archaeological mitigation work within this development. The OA East excavations targeted the results of previous evaluation work (in conjunction with geophysical survey) conducted by OA East between 2012 and 2015. The archaeological works uncovered evidence for activity spanning the Early Bronze Age, Middle Iron Age and medieval to modern periods. Three widely separate cremation pits were uncovered. One of the cremations (radiocarbon dated to 2030-1890 cal BC) was interred in an upturned Collared Urn with a jet bead placed inside. Extensive remains of an Iron Age farmstead were revealed whose feature fills produced assemblages of Middle Iron Age pottery, ironworking slag (mostly smelting with some smithing), fired clay and animal bone but were poor in plant remains, with a single relatively good quality assemblage of crop-processing waste. A central feature consisting of a roundhouse uncovered at the eastern end of the site, which was defined by a large and extensively recut ring-ditch. It lay within an enclosed part of the settlement accompanied by two lesser roundhouses (defined by simpler penannular ring-gullies), pit groups and a four-post structure. This presumed domestic focus produced the bulk of the finds. To its west lay a large number of unenclosed discrete features which were relatively finds poor. A large D-shaped enclosure was uncovered in the western part of the excavation that encompassed a further possible roundhouse gully and discrete features that included the truncated base of a possible burnt mound or midden. A further enclosure was partly revealed to its south which mostly lay beyond the southern excavation limit. Only a very small quantity of diagnostic Late Iron Age and Roman pottery was recovered, suggesting that this farmstead was abandoned by the 1st century BC. A much more recent set of intermittent linear ditches extending across the site probably represent former field divisions of medieval or later origin, whose orientation was later respected by a set of east to west aligned agricultural furrows.