Appleford’s Earliest Farmers

From 1993-2000 Oxford Archaeology examined a sequence of rural landscapes at Hanson Aggregates’ Sutton Courtenay Pit ahead of gravel extraction. The earliest of these, a rectilinear system of trackways and field enclosures, with associated waterholes for animals, devleoped from about 1500 BC. Probably contemporary cremation burials lay close by. No significant later prehistoric evidence was found, but about the middle of the 1st century AD a high-status double-ditched enclosure was established. This settlement was associated with further rectilinear field systems, enclosures and trackways and two cremation burials. This settlement went out of use after c AD 120 and subsequent activity was entirely agricultural in nature.