Addenbrooke's 2040 Lands, Cambridge (Land South of Dame Mary Archer Way)

Between the 3rd – 5th of March 2015, Oxford Archaeology East (OA East) conducted an archaeological evaluation on land directly south of Dame Mary Archer Way on the southern outskirts of Cambridge. Previous excavations, carried out as a result of the expansion of Addenbrooke's Hospital directly to the north-west, at the Bell Language School to the north-east and the Clay Farm/Great Kneighton development to the west, have revealed the area to be part of an extensive Bronze Age and Roman landscape.
Five linear trenches totalling 240m were excavated across the site, revealing a number of ditches which corresponded to the geophysical and cropmark evidence. Only one ditch contained datable (Roman) pottery, however, the morphology of the ditches and the cropmark evidence indicate that these features were extensions of Roman field systems to the north of the site. The comparative sparseness of the archaeology at this site compared to the density of settlement and occupation in the surrounding landscape was noteworthy and is most likely a result of the site sitting at a slightly lower and wetter contour.