An Extensive Middle to Late Bronze Age Landscape, Saxon Settlement, and Medieval Features at Horton Brook Quarry, Colnbrook, Berkshire

Archaeological fieldwork in advance of mineral extraction spanning ten phases over 13 years at Horton Brook Quarry in Berkshire, revealed an extensive enclosed and organized landscape of Middle and Middle/Late Bronze Age fields, with broadly contemporary settlement clusters, whose chronology is supported by multiple radiocarbon dates. A waterlogged Bronze Age well had a preserved wattlework retaining structure and featured the ritual deposit of a human skull. This intensively managed landscape appears to have gone out of use with the digging of a late Bronze Age long boundary ditch which cut across the site, and perhaps heralded a period of less formal land use. There then appears to have been a long period of abandonment, with very few finds from intervening periods (except a few ditches on a very different alignment at the north end which might be Roman) until these Bronze Age deposits were overlain by a number of Medieval fields and an enclosure along with pits including a well containing waterlogged remains. Only on one small area was there an exception to this general abandonment, with rare (for the region) evidence of Middle Saxon settlement dating to the 7th to 9th centuries AD, represented by a nearly square enclosure and four pits. The site produced a considerable assemblage of Bronze Age pottery (albeit very few sherds in any individual feature) but other finds were very scarce. An extensive sieving programme recovered a modest amount of environmental evidence, apart from the waterlogged remains from several waterholes. A notable find made by a metal detectorist, separately from the excavation programme, was a gold torc with gold rings threaded onto it. The gravel extraction also dragged up two mammoth tusks. See more