Archaeological Excavation: Land at 51 Cannon Street, Little Downham, Cambridgeshire

The archaeological excavation strategy was agreed with CHET at Cambridgeshire County Council, and comprised two areas, Areas 1 and 2, both c.24m x c.16m in size.The areas were located using a survey-grade Leica GS08 RTK NetRover GPS, which allowed centimetre accuracy, and were tied into the National Grid. In each area, a mechanical excavator fitted with a toothless ditching bucket was used to remove the topsoil, subsoil and underlying non-archaeological deposits in spits no greater than 0.1m in thickness. Machine excavation was monitored by an experienced archaeologist at all times and the process was repeated until the first archaeologically significant or natural horizon was exposed. All further excavation was undertaken manually to define the archaeological stratigraphy and the nature of the deposits. A full written record of the deposits was made on standard AAL context recording sheets.All finds of all classes were collected and were bagged and labelled with the appropriate context number. Whole earth environmental samples of 40 litres or the total volume of the context if less than were taken for environmental analysis from suitable contexts that had the potential to provide information on the preservation conditions and potential of analysis of all biological remains. There appears to be greater division of the landscape in the 11th century with a series of enclosures formed by the ditches in both Areas 1 and 2. The large ditches in Area 1 are potentially part of the same ditch system represented by east-west ditch Groups 10, 12 and 13 in Area 2. The pottery from these ditches suggests that they had been backfilled by the 12th century. At this point the features identified as the ridge and furrow systemappear to supersede the earlier enclosure system. This change in the organization of the land coincides with the development of the planned medieval settlement at Little Downham just to the north of the site.