5 - Exploring Black Holes: Recent Investigations in Currently Occupied Rural Settlements in Eastern England

Summary

This paper reviews the results to date of an ongoing archaeological research project at the University of Cambridge into the historic development of currently occupied rural settlements (CORS), and considers their implications for our understanding of the development of the Anglo-Saxon rural settlement pattern. Until recently, most excavation of Anglo-Saxon and medieval rural settlement has focused on sites which are now deserted, with much less attention given to sites which are lived in today. This is largely due to the apparent invisibility of the evidence, lack of opportunities for developer-funded excavation and difficulties (both real and perceived) of gaining access to land within currently occupied settlements for research-driven excavation. It is ironic that existing villages, which are lived in and visited by so many people today, can constitute one of the most inaccessible parts of the English landscape for the archaeologist. With the aim of addressing this problem, since 2005 the University of Cambridge CORS project, working with members of the public including hundreds of teenagers participating in the university's Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA), has investigated eighteen occupied rural settlements across six counties in eastern England by carrying out large numbers of test-pit excavations in an attempt to establish the extent, distribution and date of human activity within, across and around these sites. This paper will review the early results of this project, which have not only demonstrated the wealth of primary evidence that can be retrieved using this approach, but have also shown the extent to which such evidence can challenge existing ideas about settlement development, character and plan, and point to new patterns of occupation and change within settlements.

Landscape and settlement are inextricably linked in the search for knowledge and understanding: settlements were focal points in a rural landscape occupied by more than 90% of the population in the Anglo-Saxon period. Crucial to an understanding of the landscapes that people in the past worked, traversed, observed and experienced is knowledge of the settlements where they lived; similarly the development and character of settlements cannot be fully investigated independent of their landscape context.