Houghton and Wyton, Cambridgeshire (NGR TL 281271)
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Houghton and Wyton are small villages now conjoined to form a single nucleated settlement, sited on alluvial gravel between 5m and 10m OD close to the northern banks of the River Ouse 4km east of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. Prior to HEFA, the area had received no significant archaeological attention, although a Romano-British cemetery lies a little to the north of the village on Houghton Hill while the history of the villages has been reviewed some time ago by the Victoria County History.
Local Information Websites
Houghton and Wyton Village Website
Houghton and Wyton Local History Society
British History Online Houghton
2005
Nine test pits were excavated by HEFA students in 2005, with a further two dug by children attending the primary school in the village, using the HEFA instructions and recording system to investigate sites (HAW/05/P and 05/A) within their school grounds, located west of the church in Houghton. Most attention in 2005 focused on Houghton, with further work mostly in Wyton planned for 2006. Alone of the four sites investigated by HEFA in 2005, Houghton and Wyton produced evidence for prehistoric activity in the form of struck flint, close to the river flood plain. Two of the test pits (05/4 and 05/P), also both fairly close to the edge of the flood plain, also produced Roman pottery. Late Anglo-Saxon activity in the form of Thetford Ware was found in HAW/05/5 and 05/P, and also recovered by HEFA from 05/R, a c.1m x 1.2m hole which was rather fortuitously being dug by a local authority employee in the centre of the road leading north from the church in Houghton, while the HEFA investigations were taking place. Post-Conquest medieval pottery in the form of shelly and sandy wares, were found in the majority of the 2005 test pits (05/2, 05/3, 05/4, 05/5, 05/7, 05/8, 05/P and 05/A), although the single abraded sherd from TP 05/3 seems likely indicate agricultural use of this north-eastern part of the present settlement rather than occupation, a suggestion apparently reinforced by the absence of medieval material from TP 05/1 or 05/9. In contrast to the large quantity of high medieval material is the paucity of late medieval and early post-medieval pottery, which may hint at contraction in this period, although such a suggestion must remain very tentative, based as it is on negative evidence from a relatively small number of test pits.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2006
Eight test pits were excavated in the conjoined villages Houghton and Wyton in 2006, the majority of which were located in Wyton (complementing 2005 HEFA investigations which were mainly focussed on Houghton, bringing the total number of test pits excavated over both years to 19. Small quantities of pottery of Roman date were found in pits HAW06/1 and 06/6 (complementing the evidence from HAW05/4 and 05/P in 2005). Roman activity in Houghton and Wyton thus seems to favour the edge of the flood plain in Houghton and along the Huntingdon Road. Pottery of later Anglo-Saxon date was found in pits HAW06/2, 06/3 and 06/8, bringing the number of sites over the two years producing material of this date to five, derived from four sites close to the churches of both villages, and from a site adjacent to the road which currently links them, which may suggest that both settlements were in existence around their respective churches before the Norman Conquest, but that the area between them may also have been used for some purpose by this date.
Nearly all the test pits in both 2006 and 2005 (14 out of 19) produced pottery of C12th-C14th date, hinting at substantial occupation, and probably expansion, of both settlements in this period. Much less material of C15th-C16th date was found anywhere in the village, which may hint at some degree of shrinkage at this date, while a similar paucity of finds from the C17th and C18th suggests that stagnation may have lasted for some time. Notably, this later period is the only one when the pottery distribution seems to indicate a clear separation between the two villages, with no finds of post medieval pottery from any of the pits along Huntingdon Road. Examination of the sections of HAW06/5 and 4, north of Huntingdon Road, neither of which produced any pre-19th century pottery, indicated the presence of arable soils immediately beneath the topsoil suggesting this area was not settled until the early modern period.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2008
Eighteen test pits were excavated in 2008 in the now-conjoined villages of Houghton and Wyton, bringing the total number of test pits excavated to thirty-seven. An area of Iron Age activity with pottery spanning the middle and late Iron Age was identified between the two present villages and the more evidence was found for a linear spread of material of Roman date between the edge of the flood plain and the Huntingdon Road. A single sherd of early/middle Saxon ware dating to 6th-8th century AD hinted at the possibility that the earliest post-Roman settlement lay in the area immediately south-west of the present site of Houghton church. Settlement in Houghton in the 9th to 11th centuries appears to have been focused further to the north, between the church and Huntingdon Road, and seems to have been of a reasonable size, larger or more intensively occupied, it appears on current evidence, than Wyton.
June 2008
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
July 2008
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
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Pottery Distribution Map |