This is the first volume charting the CAU's ongoing Barleycroft
Farm/Over investigations, which now encompasses almost twenty years of
fieldwork across both banks of the River Great Ouse at its junction with
the Fen. Amongst the project's main directives is the status of a major
river in prehistory - when a communication corridor and when a divide?
Accordingly, a key component throughout has been the documentation of
the lower Ouse's complex palaeoenvironmental history, and a delta-like
wet landscape dotted with midstream islands has been mapped. This book
is specifically concerned with the length of The Over Narrows, whose
naming alludes to an extraordinary series of mid-channel 'river race'
ridges. With their excavation generating vast artifact sets and unique
palaeo-economic data, these ridges saw intense settlement sequences,
ranging from Mesolithic camps, Grooved Ware, Beaker and Collared Urn pit
clusters (plus field plots) to Middle Bronze fieldsystems and their
attendant settlements, a massive Late Bronze Age midden complex and,
finally, an Iron Age shrine. The latter involved extensive human bone or
body-part deposition and bird sacrifice. Four upstanding turf barrows
and two accompanying waterlogged pond barrows feature among the main
excavations reported here. With more than 40 cremations (including in
situ pyres), the resultant detailing of Early Bronze Age mortuary
practices and the insights into the period's monument construction are
groundbreaking. This is an important book, for the scale of The Narrows'
excavations and palaeoenvironmental studies, its comprehensive dating
programs and, particularly, the innovative methodologies and analyses
undertaken. Indeed, a commitment to experiment has lain at the project's
core.
