22km of road, 232ha of land, 8 years of work – the scale of the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon Road Improvement Scheme necessitated one of the largest commercial archaeological projects ever to be undertaken within the UK. Archaeologically, the discoveries were even more impressive, ranging from the remains of Pleistocene woolly mammoths, Neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial and burial monuments, dozens of Iron Age and Roman settlements, a whole new Roman pottery industry, Saxon settlements with royal connections, a deserted medieval hamlet, nineteenth century railway remains, and everything inbetween.
This monograph discusses some of the project’s key findings, major themes, and interesting debates, and is designed to supplement the other outputs from the project. Starting in the Bronze Age, we consider why evidence for middlelate Bronze Age settlement was not identified, and yet two of the largest cremation cemeteries in the region were. The Iron Age chapter explores the huge increase in archaeologically visible settlement during the later Iron Age, whilst the Roman chapter places the abundant evidence for Roman settlement amongst the regional dataset to provide a review of socioeconomic development in the rural hinterlands of Godmanchester and Cambridge. The Saxon chapter considers the ‘Middle Saxon settlement revolution’ and the impact this had on the A14 settlements, with the medieval chapter focusing on the deserted medieval hamlet of Houghton and its relationship with surrounding woodlands.