A Bronze Age Barrow with associated funerary evidence and a Roman trackway at Horseheath Road, Linton

From 6th July to 4th September 2020 Oxford Archaeology East conducted an excavation at land south of Horseheath Road, Linton, Cambridgeshire (TL 57170 46743). Five phases of activity were identified spanning the Early Bronze Age to post-medieval periods, with the majority of features dating to the Bronze Age, including a round barrow and associated burials.
During the Early Bronze Age period a barrow was constructed, represented by a large (32m diameter) ring ditch, probably originally accompanied by an outer bank and small internal mound. A single inhumation burial of an adult female was found at the centre of the barrow, accompanied by a partial pig skeleton which represented an intentional grave good, and with a large post-hole adjacent to the grave which appears to have acted as a grave marker. The fills of the ring ditch yielded a large quantity of worked flint (31,227 worked flints and 500 unworked burnt flints) the vast majority of which represents later, large scale flintworking during the Middle to Late Bronze Age period.
This later period also saw the burial of four Middle Bronze Age cremations into the area enclosed by the ring ditch. Radiocarbon dates from these burials suggest that they occurred in two phases, with a single unurned example initially deposited within the southern part of the barrow followed by a group (Group 126) of three urned cremations in the north-east. Use of the barrow continued into the Late Bronze Age; a group of pits within the area of the barrow have been tentatively dated to this period due to the recovery of small quantities of Post Deverel-Rimbury pottery. Other features surrounding the barrow (two boundary ditches, a post-built fenceline and a group of pits) have been broadly dated to the Middle to Late Bronze Age, probably representing some settlement-type activity during this time, with the pits producing small quantities of domestic waste and the ditches forming part of a field system.
At some point in the Roman period (probably the 1st to 3rd century AD), a trackway was constructed across the western part of the site on a north-east to south-west alignment. A small group of ditches in the north-west corner of the site and a single pit have also been dated to this phase. The very small pottery assemblage recovered from these features suggest that they probably relate to settlement elsewhere, perhaps a Roman villa known to lie some 500m south of the site.
The barrow probably remained a prominent earthwork in the landscape in post-Roman times, on the basis that a second inhumation burial uncovered within the southern part of the area enclosed by the ring ditch contained the skeleton of a sub-adult, accompanied by two iron knife blades, which has been radiocarbon dated to the Early Anglo-Saxon period (5th/6th century). A layer of colluvium (144) accumulated over much of the western part of the site, sealing the earlier Roman features and was cut by a series of post-medieval field boundaries.
Other than the large quantity of worked flint from the site, other finds were recovered in low quantities and included pottery dating to the prehistoric and Roman periods, animal bone, metal working debris, stone and ceramic building material. Although a number of environmental samples were taken from across the site, preservation was fairly poor.
The site at Horseheath Road adds to a growing corpus of sites with Bronze Age funerary evidence in this part of Cambridgeshire alongside an exceptional assemblage of later prehistoric worked flint.