Excavations at Over: Chain Bridge Terrace Investigations

This report details the results of the excavation of Site 2, a l ha. area located either side of a concrete roadway known as Fen Drove, near Over village, Cambridgeshire. The investigation took place over a three month-long period in the summer of 1999. It represents one part of an extensive on-going project investigating the prehistoric occupation of the alluviated landscape around the junction of the fen-edge and River Great Ouse as contained within the area of Hanson's Needingworth/Over quarry. The results of this investigation can be added to an increasing body of work that involves excavations on both sides of the river at Barleycroft Farm and within the Over Lowlands. The site was situated along the northern edge of Chain Bridge Terrace near the beginning of Papworth Ridge, a sand and gravel peninsula that once extended north-eastwards out into the fen that occupied the ground between the dry-lands of Over/Willingham and Haddenham. The main components of Site 2 were a cluster of Late Neolithic, Grooved Ware pits and the corner of a Middle Bronze Age fieldsystem. The pit cluster occupied a small c. 0.40m high knoll or rise located to the edge of the terrace (up to c. 1.60m OD, the buried groundsurface otherwise lying at c. 1.00-1.20m OD), which later became enclosed by the north-easternmost extent of a fieldsystem. The story of the knoll’s occupation and subsequent containment is the story of the site, and as this knoll represents one of many 'islands' of activity that made up Over's prehistoric landscape it is also part of the history of that landscape. This report in particular looks at how one space in that landscape was at one time a place of temporary settlement and at another permanently enclosed. Part of telling this history involves an understanding of the processes behind the artefact densities located within the buried soil horizon that sealed the pits and ditches that constituted these different phases of occupation