In 2004 a large-scale excavation covering some 30 ha was undertaken at the site of Imerys Minerals' Scarcewater tip, St Stephen-in-Brannel. The archaeological investigations focused on three roundhouses and a ploughed-down barrow of Middle Bronze Age date, together with a range of structures and pits, an enclosed Late Bronze Age roundhouse and pits, an Iron Age cairn and Romano-British settlement and funerary activity. The excavations demonstrated shifting settlement and changes to the character of settlement and ceremony over a period spanning the Bronze Age to the Romano-British period (c 1500 cal BC – AD 410). This paper presents a summary of the major findings from the project, namely the Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements, an Iron Age ceremonial site and the Romano-British burials.

The paper begins by considering the importance of springs as a focus for votive deposits in Bronze Age Britain. This is not a new idea, but nowhere has this association been examined by excavation of one of these features. There are important lesson to be learned from such work in Scandinavia. The point is illustrated by excavation at the findspot of a famous group of Late Bronze Age weapons, the Broadward hoard, discovered in 1867. Little was known about the site where it was found or the character of the original deposit, but a study of contemporary accounts of the hoard, combined with geophysical and topographical surveys, led to small-scale excavation which showed that the deposit had most probably been buried in a pit on the edge of a spring. Other finds associated with the spring included an Early Bronze Age macehead, a Roman pot, and a variety of animal bones dating from the Saxon and medieval periods. The latest, which has a radiocarbon date in the post-medieval phase, inclu...

Short note about excavations at Eddington near Herne Bay, describing the discovery of later prehistoric, Romano-British and later features on a site which is best known for a significant long-blade assemblage of the British Early Postglacial period (see Julie Gardiner, Michael J. Allen, John SC Lewis, James Wright and Richard I Macphail 2015 A Long Blade site at Underdown Lane, Herne Bay, Kent and a model for habitat use in the British Early Postglacial, http://www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/10/016.pdf).