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Published Articles

Nov 17

Front-Cover Find: A Medieval Bone Flute from Huntingdon

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The Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (PCAS) Volume CXIV features PCA on the front cover once again, this time with a striking find from Huntingdon: a medieval bone flute made from a pig’s tibia.

While bone flutes were common in the medieval period, they were usually carved from sheep or goat tibiae, or the wing bones of domesticated birds like geese. The use of pig bone is unusual, and even more remarkable is how well it has survived; complete medieval flutes are very rare finds.

It’s a small object, but one that gives a real sense of medieval life, the sounds people would have heard, and the ways everyday objects were made. A simple flute, but one that deserves its front-cover moment!

Nov 17

Rediscovering Little End

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An article by Isobel Woolhouse has just been published in Current Archaeology, exploring the traces of Little End, a small hamlet that once stood on the edge of Eaton Socon, Cambridgeshire. Though long lost beneath modern development, the community has re-emerged through PCA’s recent excavations.

The work reveals a cluster of modest cottages from the 18th and 19th centuries, the homes of farm labourers, laundresses, and shopkeepers. These were ordinary people living ordinary lives, yet the combination of archaeological evidence, historic records, and local memories turns the site into something unexpectedly vivid. Broken ceramics, reused bricks, a small shop, a pair of sisters earning a living through laundry work: each thread helps rebuild the character of a place otherwise almost forgotten.

Rather than focusing on grand houses or elite stories, the article highlights the quiet, everyday world that shaped the rural landscape. It’s a thoughtful look at how small settlements functioned, changed, and ultimately disappeared, and why they still matter.

Click here to read Isobel’s article

Jun 02

‘Surprises from the Roman frontier’ published

By News, Published Articles

Scott Vance’s article on Turret 3a of Hadrian’s Wall is now out in the 400th edition of Current Archaeology.

In ‘Surprises from the Roman frontier: Excavating Hadrian’s Wall in urban Tyneside’ Scott details our investigations in the summer of 2021 which revealed not only the first turret to be uncovered along the Wall in over 40 years, but the largest example identified to date, together with other defensive features.

Click here to see Scott’s presentation to Current Archaeology Live! earlier this year

Jan 18

Crystal Park, Bottisham: The Construction Materials of a Roman Villa Complex – A Cambridgeshire Case Study

By News, Published Articles

Congratulations to Kevin Hayward and Christiane Meckseper, whose article on a vast amount of Roman building material recovered from Crystal Park has been published in Britannia by Cambridge University Press.

During excavations in Bottisham, a known hot-spot for Roman settlement on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens, we identified many elements of a rural farmstead or villa complex dating from the early third- to early fourth-century. A policy to retain all of the 2.6 metric tonnes of building materials recovered from the site provided a rare opportunity for detailed investigation into the fabric, form, construction style and function of the various elements used in three masonry buildings and associated features.

Building 1 was a sunken, double-apsed structure, built using carefully selected courses of lydion brick and large blocks of Barnack stone. The apsidal shape is typical of a Roman bath-house and surviving opus signinum and opus spicatum floors, along with an archway for flues, attest to its intended use as a bath-house. However, the remains of this building were pristine with no sooting, and no box-flue tiles, pilae or decorative elements were found. The evidence points to the structure being an unfinished bath-house.

Building 2 consisted of a rectangular room and part of an external curved wall. It contained a concentration of yellow and orange roofing tile treated with red slip, which may have been an aesthetic choice in keeping with the red roofs of the other buildings, suggesting that Building 2 was a later addition. The Barnack stone in this building was fragmentary unlike the large blocks in Building 1, suggesting it was robbed stone reused as rubble. Limited quantities of brick were recovered so this building was probably a timber-framed structure on stone footings. The querns and millstone grit all came from Building 2’s demolition layer suggesting this was an ancillary building – a mill, barn or possible domestic building.

Building 3 was a rectangular building, the largest of the three with four rooms. Evidence for an extensive box-flue tile heating system was found and thick mortar attached to one side of the tiles only, and sometimes as vent infill, would have insulated the circulated hot air for use as either a sweat room, laconicum, or the heated opulent caldarium of a bath-house. There is a notable lack of sooting on the tubuli from Building 3, but this could be the result of the distance of the box-flue from the heat source rather than a sign of complete non-use.  Building 3 may be a wing of a larger building extending beyond the limit of excavation.

Jan 06

Holocene Climate Change and Human Impact

By News, Published Articles

Our Head of Environment Jane Wheeler is the first to publish an article this year, with a paper for the open-access journal Quaternary MDPI, co-written by Katherine A. Selby and Sally Derrett from the Universities of York and Sheffield respectively.

The dramatically shifting climate of the early- to mid-Holocene period coincided with population expansion in northwest Europe. In ‘Disentangling Holocene Climate Change and Human Impact from Palaeoenvironmental Records from the Scottish West Coast’ the authors present fascinating new environmental evidence to determine the extent to which the changing landscape of Mesolithic populations in western Scotland was climate-driven, rather than a result of changing human land-use.

Click here to read the full article