Beyond the Fens: Rethinking Middle Bronze Age Landscapes in East Anglia

ABSTRACT The discovery of Middle Bronze Age field systems at Fengate, to the east of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire (Pryor 1980), in the 1970s, was hugely significant for Bronze Age studies in eastern England. Since then, gravel quarry excavations along the western edge of the East Anglian Fens – several of which have become vast, long-running landscape projects – have shaped our understanding of the region’s prehistory. This paper will examine new evidence from the (comparatively) ‘upland’ region of East Anglia, to the south and east of the Fens – primarily through two case study landscapes: South Cambridgeshire (along the Cam Valley) and East Norfolk (the Bure and Yare/Wensum Valleys). Both areas have seen extensive archaeological investigation over the past 15 years and offer new perspectives on the region’s Bronze Age, where land division and settlement context appear different to that of the Fenland and where burial rites display a diversity that has until recently been largely unrecognised. Recent and upcoming publication of these landscapes highlights the need for up-to-date synthesis and review of the region’s Middle Bronze Age evidence, and accordingly, the wider East Anglian context is also briefly considered here, in the hope of providing stimulus for further research and analysis.