Great Western Park, Didcot, Oxfordshire

<p>The first phase of excavation at Great Western Park sheds new light on settlement and landscape development from the early Mesolithic to the Anglo-Saxon period in the south Oxfordshire Thames Valley.</p><p><br></p><p>The earliest significant discovery was an early Mesolithic flint scatter associated with an incised stone plaque. Subsequent periods were represented only by sporadic features, including a few early Neolithic pits, one of which contained a complete, inverted bowl. An early Bronze Age stone-paved hollow, comparable to a pond barrow, lay within a landscape which provides sparse evidence for occupation in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. A dispersed group of three late Bronze Age roundhouses, set within a field system, provides the first clearer evidence for later occupation.</p><p><br></p><p>The most significant discovery was an extensive early and middle Iron Age settlement, represented by a band of around a thousand pits, spread over 400m along a ditched boundary, dating from c 440-50 cal BC. Loose clusters of roundhouses, four-post structures and other features were built in locations which shifted around the pit scatter over time.</p><p><br></p><p>After a decline in activity in the late Iron Age, a series of trackways and enclosures, associated with corn drying ovens, wells and a few burials, was laid out in the Roman period. In the late Roman period a villa, only very partially exposed in the excavations, was constructed on the site.</p><p><br></p><p>A single sunken-featured building indicates occupation in the Anglo-Saxon period, after which the site became part of the open fields of Didcot and Harwell.</p>