Early Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman pit deposits at Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire

Excavation in advance of housing development found features of early Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman date. A pit containing rusticated Beaker pottery, disarticulated human bone, animal bone, including aurochs, as well as hazelnut shells and some carbonised mistletoe stem, has been radiocarbon dated to the late third millennium BC. A crouched inhumation of a man, buried in an oval pit and accompanied by a bone toggle, has been radiocarbon dated to the middle Iron Age, probably the second century BC. It may have lain within a small sub circular enclosure. Most of the other activity dated to the late Iron Age/early Roman period, with ditches and pits suggesting the existence of a farmstead lying mainly beyond the excavated area. Of particular interest was a deep pit, dated to the later-first or earlier second centuries AD, containing burials of goose and a dog.