Archaeological Excavations at Holme Hall Quarry, South Yorkshire

This volume documents the results from large-scale archaeological investigations at Holme Hall Quarry on the Magnesian Limestone ridge in South Yorkshire. The excavations were preceded by extensive fieldwalking and geophysical surveys which together have revealed multiperiod archaeological remains across an area of landscape where very little archaeology had previously been known. The work set out in this volume adds an important dimension to the archaeology of South Yorkshire and reveals how strip, map and sample excavation can help to fill gaps in knowledge and give a more detailed understanding of the organisation of the early Roman frontier region in Britannia.

Scatters of chipped lithics dating to the Mesolithic to Early Bronze Age were uncovered, and also pits and a possible Middle Iron Age structure, but the main occupation of the site occurred during the Roman period when two rural farmsteads were constructed and a field system with associated droveways and enclosures imposed across the landscape. The field system was probably established in the mid-late 1st century AD, early in the Roman military occupation, as a planned reorganisation of the landscape which served to intensify agricultural production of livestock and crops, presumably for both local consumption and export to the Roman military. Numerous late Roman pits and postholes within the two farmsteads suggest the area was occupied until at least the late 3rd century AD, but virtually no evidence was found for Roman activity in or after the early/mid 4th-century, perhaps due to disruption of the previous system of military supply and unrest at this time across Britannia and other parts of the Roman Empire.

Features dating to the Anglo-Saxon period were also present, but there is little evidence for activity thereafter until the 18th and 19th centuries. During this period local limestone was quarried and burnt to produce lime for ‘marling’ the fields to support the increase in agricultural production needed to support the Napoleonic war effort and growing urbanisation.