An account of the multi-period, 13-hectare, excavations associated with a road scheme on the A63 at Melton, East Yorkshire and funded by the Highways Agency. They revealed buildings, boundaries, burials and tracks associated with a late Iron Age and early Roman ladder settlement and showed that its origins lay in the early centuries of the first millennium BC. Many occupation sites of this period, in East Yorkshire, show little apparent change at the time of the Roman conquest but here there were clear transformations. Buildings were abandoned just before the conquest and new boundaries were laid out soon after. The burial sequence ran from the early Bronze Age to the late Iron Age and included a rare early Iron Age inhumation cemetery, pre-dating the region's famous square barrow burials by a couple of centuries. There was also a small group of Anglo-Saxon burials with contemporary 7th century occupation, and medieval remains on the edge of the modern village of Melton.