Didn’t we have a lovely time…

Over the last 9 months Oxford Archaeology has been excavating along the new route for Skanska UK Construction Ltd, who are building the road for the Highways Agency. The route crosses two chalk plateaux divided by a dry valley at Tollgate, with another valley at Downs Road to the west, and lies alongside the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), along which excavation had revealed settlements of various periods that were likely to continue into the route. The approach to the archaeology agreed was therefore to strip as much as possible of the whole of the offline route in one go, providing a transect nearly 3km long and 50m or more wide across the landscape of North-West Kent. This showed that the density of archaeological features was even greater, and more continuous, than predicted from the CTRL results, and over the 9 months of excavation settlements ranging from the Bronze Age to the late medieval period have been found, as well as tools from earlier hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers.

This article concentrates on the later prehistoric and Roman burials, which represent some of the most significant archaeological discoveries. During the Iron Age a cluster of enclosures developed west of Tollgate, forming a nucleated settlement 500m long. Houses were scarce, but there were plenty of square four-post buildings and storage pits; one surprise was a cobbled trackway 6-8m wide crossing the site, a rare instance of road construction before the Roman period. The settlement also included both inhumation and cremation burials in pits. Two of the cremation burials, both found in the entrance to an enclosure, were of people of high status, as one contained four pots and four copper brooches, two joined by a chain, possibly in an iron-studded box, the other two pots and a bronze-bound bucket with decorated plaques, plus a high tin-bronze cylinder probably from a drinking horn.

Beyond this settlement to the west a very large boundary ditch was dug along the edge of the plateau at Downs Road, perhaps laying a stronger claim to territory. Fields ran from this boundary down the valley side. Inhumation burials were placed both at the end and adjacent to a shaft in the base of the ditch within the Iron Age, a practice that continued into the Roman period, when a small cemetery grew alongside. Most of the Roman dead were buried in coffins, and several wore hobnailed boots. They can be dated to 50-250 AD. The proximity of this small rural cemetery to the larger burial ground at Pepperhill just east of Springhead, where the rite was mixed cremations and inhumations, provides an interesting contrast.