The construction of a new shopping center afforded MOLA the opportunity
to investigate a 3.55ha site located between the north bank of the River
Avon and the southern defenses of Roman and later Bath. Extensive
geoarchaeological work allowed the modeling and dating of the main
stages in the evolution of this part of the Avon flood plain from at
least the Late Devensian (23-11.5ka BP). The pre-Holocene land forms can
be related to the wider pattern of climate-driven landscape change. A
very large lithic assemblage points to task-based activities on or
immediately adjacent to the site in the Early and Late Mesolithic, but
analysis indicates that the recovered scatters have been subject to
post-depositional processes. Little evidence for the use of the flood
plain in the Roman period was recovered, but the outer defenses of the
Anglo-Saxon burh were investigated and extramural activity of rural and
perhaps popular religious character recorded. Following the Norman
Conquest, major landscape reorganization took place, with extensive
quarrying, the construction of the earliest southern road out of the
city, the laying out of burgage plots and creation of an artificial
watercourse to serve as a mill race and perhaps flood defense.
Occupation in the southern suburb is well represented from the mid 13th
century and its character and development is reconstructed in a sequence
terminating in two destructive events of the 20th century - the air
raids of 1942 and the construction of the first Southgate shopping
center in the 1970s.
