Cattle, Community and Place

Detailing the results of excavations undertaken by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus between 2007 and 2016, this volume builds upon the work of previous large-scale projects within an area that now represents one of the most intensively investigated archaeological landscapes in Britain. Also included is a chapter contributed by Oxford Archaeology East concerning their excavations within the Biomedical Campus, which has enabled full publication of the site’s archaeology in a single volume.

The excavations exposed three major sites: a Middle Bronze Age enclosure complex, a Late Iron Age–Early Roman farmstead with associated ring-ditch cemetery, and a first- to fourth-century AD Roman farmstead. The archaeological evidence and analyses of the sites’ substantial artifact assemblages and economic data are presented alongside detailed consideration of the palaeoenvironment and Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon dates relating to the Middle Bronze Age enclosure sequence. Preliminary results from aDNA analysis of burials from the site’s small Late Roman inhumation cemetery and the nearby Late Iron Age/Early Roman cemetery at the Hutchison Site – previously excavated and published by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit – are also included. Together, the results provide new and important insight into the region’s prehistoric and Late Iron Age–Roman settlement, their respective economies and the communities that inhabited them.