Excavations at the Neolithic Site at Hurst Fen, Mildenhall, Suffolk (1954, 1957 and 1958)

Abstract

The site at Hurst Fen in the parish of Mildenhall, Suffolk, was first brought within the cognizance of prehistorians by Lady Grace Briscoe, F.S.A., whose investigations, published in 1954, were sufficient to make it a type site of the East Anglian group of the British primary Neolithic settlement. Thanks are due to Lady Briscoe for most generously encouraging more extensive excavations and to the Crowther-Benyon Fund administered by the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge for providing the necessary funds. The assistance is also gratefully acknowledged of undergraduate and other members of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge and of a number of friends without whose combined labours the fine and repeated scraping of some 20,000 square feet of sub-soil could hardly have been accomplished. Mr E. S. Higgs, Assistant in Research in the Department, undertook much of the supervisory work during the last two seasons, as well as contributing an arduous metrical analysis of the flints and most notably of the scrapers from this and other sites. Mr I. H. Longworth has contributed the description of the pottery and in so doing has devised means for demonstrating its character quantitatively as well as qualitatively, a task too infrequently attempted in this field. To the Curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and his assistant staff a deep debt is owed for a number of essential services, both in connection with the field-work, but principally in the treatment of the finds, notably in the reconstruction and photography of the pottery. Finally, thanks are returned to all those who offered advice about the archaeological material or who contributed the expert identifications incorporated in the following report.