Central Archaeology Service, analytical projects

Raunds Area Project, Northamptonshire - Stanwick

Excavations were carried out on the late Iron Age and Romano-British site of Stanwick, Northamptonshire, between 1984 and 1991. Roman masonry buildings, including a villa with mosaics, were known to overlie extensive Iron Age occupation. The principal objective of excavation was to recover as full a plan of the masonry buildings as possible, confining deeper excavations to areas below buildings and in other areas where there was the possibility of long sequences of occupation.

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Stanwick, Northamptonshire: Composite plan of the site

After seven seasons the picture that emerged is one of settlement in the area going back to the middle Iron Age and continuing through to the early Saxon period. The arrangement of the occupation changed over time. In the Iron Age the activity appears to have been organised in zones with areas for housing, storage, and farming. This layout was subsequently broken up, probably towards the end of the Iron Age, by the creation of more separate `farmstead' areas with land enclosed by ditches and other boundaries. During the Roman period larger farmstead enclosures, delimited by stone walls, were established and stone was also used instead of timber for the internal buildings. Some of these farmsteads grew into sizeable complexes, and one of these developed into a villa. Initially, this comprised an aisled barn with native style houses to the north but it gradually expanded as additions were made through time so that, by the late fourth century AD, the complex had become a winged corridor villa with the east end of the aisled barn forming the facade. The nature of the Saxon occupation has yet to be determined, but included a number of burials.

Inevitably the extensive excavations produced copious quantities of material finds and samples and a large record of context descriptions, site drawings, and photographs. Over the past three years this archive has been checked and sorted, written records have been input to computer databases, artefacts have been conserved, and drawings and photographs transferred to storage in a stable environment. Preliminary basic analysis of the structural record, material finds, and environmental samples and transfer of the drawn site plans to AutoCad have taken place. Summaries of the buildings have been written, structural groupings have been identified and described, and site-wide periods have been defined. This stage of record completion has been followed by a period of assessment which has now resulted in the completion of a report which defines the potential for further analysis of all components of the project and sets out the programme necessary to complete the project. Work on the final analytical stage of the project is now under way and a report will be produced for the English Heritage Archaeological Reports Series in 1997-98.