SNN115049 - Excavation Of An Iron Age Settlement And A Middle Saxon Cemetery At Great Houghton, Northampton, 1996

A corridor 400m long by 15m wide along the course of a proposed Anglian Water pipeline was stripped under archaeological supervision in 1996 to determine the presence and character of any archaeological remains. The dense palimpsest of features located was sampled in an archaeological recording action. The majority of the features related to an extensive area of Iron Age settlement. The earliest activity probably comprised unenclosed posthole and pit groups. A sub-rectangular ditched enclosure contained numerous pits, and in one an adult inhumation burial with a lead alloy neck ring or torc around its neck has been radiocarbon dated to the early 4th century BC. To the east, a roundhouse ring ditch lay outside a small oval enclosure. Settlement began at the end of the early Iron Age, at around 400BC, and continued through the middle Iron Age. It was abandoned in the early 1st century AD. A group of 23 inhumation burials, all aligned west-to-east, and without grave goods, formed the southern part of a cemetery of unknown extent. A single radiocarbon date indicates that it was a Christian cemetery dating to the second half of the 7th Century. The burial produced much evidence for healed traumatic injuries, and a high incidence of anatomical variants may indicate that they were from a small inbred community. One individual shared an uncommon genetic trait with the Iron Age pit burial. At the western end of the area a group of rectangular clay pits of medieval date were aligned on the ridge and furrow of the medieval field system.