Land East of the New Bedford River, Bridge Road, Mepal, Plot 1

Between the 18th of June and the 5th of July 2019, Oxford Archaeology East carried out an excavation on a small parcel of land on the northern edge of the village of Mepal, Cambridgeshire (TL 4414 81358). The excavation exposed a series of enclosure ditches and a relatively large number of small pits associated with Late Iron Age/Early Roman pottery and representing activity dating almost exclusively to the mid-1st century AD.
These features produced relatively modest finds assemblages, dominated by pottery, with small quantities of animal bone and fired clay. Although most of the pottery was highly fragmented and abraded, a few features produced relatively coherent and substantial assemblages which appear to reflect the deliberate deposition of material associated with domestic activity. Although the small scale of the excavation has rendered interpretation of the site difficult, it seems likely that it lay within or adjacent to an area of settlement, which, based on the character of the finds, seems likely to have been a relatively low status rural farmstead. Settlement of this date – in the decades either side of the Roman conquest – is well-attested elsewhere on the Isle of Ely, although in this local context the Bridge Road excavations are somewhat unusual for not producing evidence of earlier, Middle/Late Iron Age, activity, or for continued occupation into the 2nd century AD.