SNN58181 - Excavations at Isham, Northants: 1966-71

Building development, roadworks, and extensions to the village school, made necessary a series of rescue excavations in the village of Isham, Northants. A wide scatter of worked flints may represent some activity on the site in Neolithic times, but there is no evidence of actual settlement. Double perimeter ditches, roughly elliptical in plan, plus a few Iron Age sherds, and a pit alignment seen as a crop mark, all indicate settlement before the Roman conquest. Pottery and building debris from a Roman villa show almost continuous occupation to the end of the fourth century AD. A Saxon manor, followed by the medieval manor, all well documented, produced interesting groups of pottery. Later occupation of the derelict site was represented by a few seventeenth century pots and a small bake-oven. On the opposite edge of the village, a scatter of Saxon and Medieval pottery was taken from the fringe of a second manor, also well documented.