Slade End Farm and Winterbrook

This volume reports on two excavations carried out on the fringes of the town of Wallingford, at Slade End Farm and Winterbrook. The two sites lay 1.25km apart on the first gravel terrace of the Thames, and produced similar sequences of prehistoric archaeology, including Neolithic pits, middle Bronze Age enclosure systems and Iron Age settlement. Medieval occupation was also present at Winterbrook. Between them, the two sites shed significant new light on the prehistory of the south Oxfordshire Thames Valley. Though small-scale Mesolithic activity is evinced at both sites by residual worked flint, the earliest settlement features dated to the early Neolithic and were restricted to Slade End Farm. The 24 pits phased to this period were scattered widely across the site and were mostly found in pairs. The pits variously contained pottery in the Carinated Bowl, Plain Bowl and Decorated Bowl traditions, and a large assemblage of worked flint was also recovered, one pit containing an exceptional group of over 5700 pieces. Detailed analysis of the pits indicates that they typically contained material that derived from surface middens. A programme of lipid analysis on the early Neolithic pottery suggests that dairying was an important element of the economy. A pair of early Neolithic inhumation burials was also found at the edge of the site, one accompanied by a bone pin. Occupation in the subsequent stages of the Neolithic seems to have been lesser in scale. Activity during the middle Neolithic was represented at Winterbrook by a few pits and ditches and at Slade End Farm by a segmented ring ditch. Late Neolithic occupation was restricted to Slade End Farm, in the form of pits containing Grooved Ware pottery. A single pit at each site produced Beaker pottery, and at Slade End Farm a hollow surrounded by a ring of nine pits has been radiocarbon dated to the same period. After an apparent hiatus in activity during the early Bronze Age, landscape organisation dramatically changed in the middle Bronze Age, when ditched field systems or enclosure complexes were laid out at both sites. At Slade End Farm an extensive landscape of trackways, fields and enclosures was uncovered, which was fairly irregular in layout, in contrast to the coaxial field systems found at some other contemporary sites. A waterhole containing a log ladder was also found. Environ - mental remains from the waterhole suggest that the immediate area was characterised by open grassland, though the pollen evidence also indicates arable farming in the vicinity. As with many other middle Bronze Age field systems in the region, no direct evidence for settlement in the form of buildings was found, though concentrations of pottery and other finds suggest that some of the smaller enclosures may have been foci for domestic activity. The enclosure complex was not only used for farming and settlement, however. A cattle burial had been interred in a pit that cut one of the trackway ditches, and seven cremation burials were present. Two of these were bustum-type (in situ) cremation burials, while the remaining five consisted of smaller deposits of cremated bone placed around the edge of a rectangular enclosure that otherwise produced few finds. At Winterbrook, a single subrectangular enclosure with internal subdivisions extended across most of the excavated area. Only a low density of finds was recovered, suggesting that the enclosure was not a major focus for settlement. Associations with funerary ritual were more evident, as seven inhumation burials were found within or adjacent to the enclosure ditches. Another notable find from the enclosure was a fragment of a bronze weapon. Following a further hiatus in activity in the late Bronze Age, both sites were reoccupied for settlement during the Iron Age. At Slade End Farm, settlement began on a small scale during the earliest Iron Age (800–600 BC) and extended across much of the southern part of the site during the early and middle Ir