The village of Market Lavington is located on a low greensand ridge at
the foot of the north-west scarp of the chalk that forms Salisbury
Plain. Rescue excavations in 1990 recorded an inhumation cemetery
probably spanning the late 5th and 6th centuries and possibly extending
into the 7th. The cemetery has provided an opportunity to examine burial
practise in early Saxon Wiltshire and allowed an assessment of the
structure of the social groups being interred at Market Lavington. The
associated sequence of early - late Saxon and medieval settlement, and
the relatively large assemblage of finds and ecofacts, has enhanced
understanding of the growth of the village which, by the 14th century,
had become a minor town in Wiltshire.