Excavation off Swallowfield Road near Arborfield Cross has added to the corpus of Late Iron Age-Romano-British farmsteads known in the Loddon Valley. A small assemblage of Bronze Age pottery has also helped fill in the local distribution of activity from earlier in prehistory. A sequence of boundary ditches was dug towards the end of the Iron Age; these were joined by a roundhouse that was rebuilt on the same plot at least once. The remains represent part of a farm engaged in mixed agriculture: barley and spelt wheat were the dominant crops, with broad beans grown as well. Cattle, with sheep/goats also, were probably raised on or around the site. The settlement was short-lived, and whilst continuing for a short period after the end of the roundhouses, did not outlast the late 1st or early 2nd century AD. Few Romano-British features were encountered, but one contained a rich assemblage of pottery, including a fine and largely complete La Graufesenque samian bowl. This deposit may represent a reaction to the decline and end of a site where boundary-marking had long respected an established template of division.
Lichtenstein et al. (Thu,) studied this question.