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Report on a Late Bronze Age Site in Mildenhall Fen, West Suffolk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2012

J. G. D. Clark
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Extract

The history of the invasive movements associated with the diffusion of Deverel-Rimbury pottery during the Late Bronze Age in Britain can be studied from two main points of view. We may seek to discover the continental sources of the various components of the general complex, and in this way arrive at the origins of the movement and its chronology in terms of continental cultures; or we may adopt the less spectacular, if no less interesting, course, and see what can be learnt of the impact of the alien on the indigenous culture of the period in Britain. As Dr. Curwen's work on the Plumpton Plain site in Sussex has demonstrated, in conjunction with Mr. Hawkes's analysis of the pottery, the continental affinities of the Deverel-Rimbury folk are best studied within an area of primary diffusion. The mutual relations of the invasive and the indigenous folk, can, on the contrary, be appreciated most easily by working on sites peripheral to the Deverel-Rimbury distribution, such as the one in Mildenhall Fen, West Suffolk, to which attention is drawn in this paper (fig. 1).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 1936 , pp. 29 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1936

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References

page 34 note 1 ‘Report on an Early Bronze Age site in the South-Eastern Fens. Pollen-analysis of peats from Plantation Farm’, Antiq. Journ. xiii, 281–9.

page 35 note 1 Godwin, H. and , M. E., and Clifford, M. H., ‘Controlling factors in the formation of fen deposits, as shown by peat investigations at Wood Fen, near Ely’, Journal of Ecology, xxiii, 1935Google Scholar; Godwin, H., ‘Discussion on the Origin of the British Flora’, Proc. Roy. Soc., 1935Google Scholar.

page 37 note 1 British Museum, no. 53, 6–8, 2.

page 40 note 1 Now in the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge. See Fox, , Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, pl. III, 3 bGoogle Scholar.

page 41 note 1 Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, pl. 1, no. 2.

page 43 note 1 Illustrated pieces with chalk backing include: pl. VII, no. 7; fig. 4, nos. 4, 5, 12, 15; fig. 5, nos. 4, 6, 12, 13; fig. 6, nos. 1, 8; fig. 7, no. 3.

page 47 note 1 Antiq. Journ. xiii, 273–7.

page 47 note 2 It occurs on the smaller barbed and tanged arrow-head, which most probably belongs to the main period of the site.

page 48 note 1 Another, found with the burials under the Temple Bottom, Rockley, long barrow by Lukis, is illustrated in the Catalogue of Antiquities in the Museum at Devizes, 1896, pl. XII, no. 13Google Scholar.

page 49 note 1 A similar situation is reflected in the section through the upper peat bed at Plantation Farm, Shippea Hill, which shows above the Early Bronze Age level a rapid rise of the pollen of such herbaceous plants as reed-mace, bur-reed, flowering rush, and pond-weed, heralding the formation of open water over the area and the formation of beds of ‘shell-marl’, Antiq. Journ. xiii, 285.

page 49 note 2 Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, p. 57.

page 49 note 3 The site lay immediately north-west of Middle Hill Plantation at Swaffham, Cambridgeshire. It consisted of a circular trench 68 ft. in diameter and between 2 and 3 ft. deep. The pottery was characterized by raised ribs and finger-nail decoration. No metal was found, but some of the bones were ‘stained green as with bronze’. Calcined flints and flint flakes and scrapers also occurred. A contracted female (dolichocephalic) inhumation and part of a child's skeleton were found in the trench. Two or three rim sherds were assigned to the Early Iron Age by Fox, . See C. A. S. Proc. xii, 314Google Scholar; also Fox, , Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, pp. 47–8Google Scholar.