Search

Evidence for prehistoric salt production in Britain has been confined to the Bronze and Iron Ages. This article presents new evidence for Early Neolithic (3800–3700 BC) salt-working at Street House, Loftus, in north-east England. This deeply stratified coastal site has yielded the remains of a brine-storage pit and a saltern with at least three associated hearths, together with an assemblage of flint and stone tools, ceramic vessel sherds and briquetage. A process of production is suggested and parallels are drawn from contemporaneous European and later British sites. This discovery has the potential to influence future Neolithic studies considering subsistence, early technologies and exchange mechanisms.

This article presents the evidence for an open Iron Age settlement on the outskirts of Redcar. Excavation found evidence of four circular structures and associated finds. This form of open settleme...

In March 2018, a substantial part of the submerged forest at Redcar beach was exposed. The remains extended for a length of 200 m along the foreshore, a maximum width of 60 m and a maximum ...

This report concerns an excavation at Marne Barracks, Catterick, North Yorkshire, undertaken in the summer of 2015. The excavations were part of Operation Nightingale, working with Tri-Service personnel participating in archaeological projects on military bases. Six trenches were examined; two had scant remains and one trench exposed and sampled part of a substantial 20 m-diameter ring ditch. This was part of a Bronze Age burial mound and a radiocarbon date of 3223 ± 29 BP was obtained from material associated with the infilling of the ditch. The main focus of the excavation was around a Romano-British building first discovered in 1939. Excavations in 2015 re-exposed part of this fourth-century AD building and extended the outline of the structure to the south as well as discovering two Anglo-Saxon skeletons. The skeletons, like others from the immediate area, are dated to the sixth century AD.

BETWEEN 2005 AND 2007, a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery was excavated at Street House, near Loftus in Cleveland in north-eastern England. The site was discovered during a programme of research into late-prehistoric settlement in the area and hosts a range of monuments dating from 3000 bc to ad 650. In the context of the conversion period, the Anglo-Saxon cemetery is of significant interest due to a range of reused prehistoric and Romano-British objects found as gravegoods. By ad 650, when some of the objects were buried, they were already antiques, and some may have been at least 250 years old when deposited. During the conversion period, furnished burial was a diminishing rite and the placement of objects within the grave may therefore have held a greater significance. This study considers reused artefacts recovered from conversion -period cemeteries. At a time when a number of cemeteries were being founded in relation to earlier monuments, some contained burials that reused artefacts and jewellery of prehis...

This report presents the first evidence for structures associated with saltworking in Yorkshire. The report concerns an Iron Age settlement at Street House that commences in the Later Iron Age and continues into the second century ad. One interesting feature is how the site evolved to incorporate saltworking at an altitude of 170 metres. The parallels for saltworking in Fenland and the Dorset coast are discussed in terms of materials, methods and technology. One consequence of this is the question of how widely was the product distributed if briquetage is found up to 60 km inland from the Yorkshire coast at Rock Castle, Gilling.