Freston (causewayed Enclosure)

Freston is a Neolithic causewayed enclosure, an archaeological site near the village of Freston, in Suffolk, England. Causewayed enclosures were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until at least 3500 BC; they are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites.

The Freston enclosure was first identified from aerial photographs in 1969, and was excavated in 2019.

Background

Freston is a causewayed enclosure,Oswald, Dyer, & Barber (2001), p. 155. a form of earthwork that was built in northwestern Europe, including the southern British Isles, in the early Neolithic period.Whittle, Healy, & Bayliss (2011), pp. 1–2.Oswald, Dyer, & Barber (2001), p. 3. Causewayed enclosures are areas that are fully or partially enclosed by ditches interrupted by gaps, or causeways, of unexcavated ground, often with earthworks and palisades in some combination.Andersen (2015), p. 795. The function of causewayed enclosures is debated.Whittle, Healy, & Bayliss (2011), p. 5. The causeways are difficult to explain in military terms since they would have provided multiple ways for attackers to pass through the ditches to the inside of the enclosure, though it was suggested they could have been sally ports for defenders to emerge from and attack a besieging force.Cunnington (1912), p. 48. Evidence of attacks at some sites provided support for the idea that the enclosures were fortified settlements. They may have been seasonal meeting places, used for trading cattle or other goods such as pottery.Whittle, Healy, & Bayliss (2011), pp. 10–11.

There is also evidence that they played a role in funeral rites: material such as food, pottery, and human remains was deliberately deposited in the ditches. The construction of these enclosures would have required substantial labour for clearing the land, preparing trees for use as posts or palisades, and digging the ditches, and would probably have been planned for some time in advance, as they were built in a single operation.

Over seventy causewayed enclosures have been identified in the British Isles, and they are one of the most common types of an early Neolithic site in Western Europe. About a thousand are known in all. They began to appear at different times in different parts of Europe: dates range from before 4000 BC in northern France, to shortly before 3000 BC in northern Germany, Denmark, and Poland. The enclosures began to appear in southern Britain shortly before 3700 BC, and continued to be built for at least 200 years; in a few cases, they continued to be used as late as 3300 to 3200 BC.

Site

The Freston enclosure is in Suffolk, near the village of Freston, south of Ipswich. It lies above sea level on the Shotley peninsula in southeast East Anglia, between the estuaries of the Orwell and Stour rivers. It was identified from aerial photographs taken in 1969 and 1972. The ditch circuits, as revealed by cropmarks, consist of two concentric circles, with numerous gaps in the ditches. Cropmarks also show faint traces of a line between the ditches which may indicate where a palisade once stood, though this is only clear in the north and northeastern parts of the circuit. The remains of a rectangular structure, , can be detected within the enclosure in the northeastern corner.Carter et al. (2021), p. 121. The structure has not been dated, but if it were found to be Neolithic it would be the first causewayed enclosures in the UK with a Neolithic structures inside its circuit, though examples are known from the continent. The B1080 road passes through the site from south to northeast.Martin (2007), p. 1. Farm buildings (part of Potash Farm) along the southwest part of the circuit date from the 17th century, and in the 19th century two cottages (known as Latimer Cottages) were built to the south-east of the centre of the enclosure.

The enclosure is , which makes it one of the largest causewayed enclosures known.Carter et al. (2022), p. 89. The site has no features that are visible above ground; all banks and ditches have been levelled by ploughing for many years.Carter et al. (2021), p. 122.

Neolithic practices began to reach Britain in about 4050 BC, spreading across the channel, and reaching south-eastern England, including Suffolk, early in the process. Freston is about from the sea; it would have been about from the sea at the start of the Neolithic. The location between two river valleys would have made it more easily accessible to the seafaring groups that crossed from the continent, and a spring within the enclosure would have made the site attractive, for practical reasons, and perhaps also for the ritual or symbolic significance of springs.

Archaeological investigations

Discovery, fieldwalking, and watching briefs

Aerial photographs taken by the RAF in 1944 showed no sign of cropmarks, and the site was not discovered until 1969. That year J. K. St Joseph, who ran the Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography (CUCAP) program for many years, took aerial photographs that recorded cropmarks in the northern part of the site. Further photography was undertaken in the 1970s by CUCAP and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME).Dyer (1995), p. 4. Fieldwalking in the winter of 1979-1980 and again in 1985 found some worked flint, including an arrowhead, pot boilers, blades, and flint flakes. In 1995 Carolyn Dyer of the Air Photography Unit of the RCHME used aerial photographs to create a map of the site showing the cropmarks overlaid on the local topography.Wightman (2011), p. 2.

In 2007 a geophysical survey was performed on the northeastern quadrant of the enclosure, east of the B1080, using magnetometry and earth resistance. The survey identified several possible pits, some of which could be Saxon sunken-featured buildings, though this would require excavation to confirm.Schofield et al. (2021), p. 112. In November 2007 construction work on one of the cottages within the enclosure required a watching brief, which produced a single flint.

Although the site is a scheduled national monument, the area of the road that passes through it is not protected, and in 2010 the local electricity provider excavated a trench along the side of the southern part of the road, to bury a cable that had been run overhead on telegraph poles. The excavation was monitored, and the removed soil examined for artefacts. Four sherds of pottery were found; two were thought to date to the Middle Bronze Age (about 1400 BC to 1000 BC), but the other two could not be dated. A total of 47 flints were recovered, dated from early to late Neolithic. Three flakes were identified as a type of flint known to come from the Thames Basin.

FARM project

In 2018, a team from McMaster University began the Freston Archaeological Research Mission (FARM), a project designed to gather more information about the enclosure, and to contribute to the study of the cultural changes of the early Neolithic. That year Tristan Carter and Deanna Aubert of McMaster University conducted two weeks of fieldwalking on Latimer Field, a small part of which overlaps with the southeast quadrant of the site, to the east of the B1080. The finds were sparse compared to results from other Neolithic sites. Twelve flints were found, all of which were considered to date to the Early Neolithic, except for two gunflints, probably dating from the 17th or 18th centuries. Ceramic finds included a sherd of Thetford ware, dated to the 9th to 11th century, and some salt-glazed stoneware that was manufacturing between 1400 and 1900 AD. Most sherds were from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Other finds included glass from bottles, glasses, bowls and serving vessels; roof-tile fragments; and pieces of clay pipe stems. Most of the area that was surveyed lay outside the causewayed enclosure, and the low density of finds was consistent with the results of the geophysical survey in 2007, which had found "increased activity within the enclosure and very little activity outside it". The ceramic finds were spread more or less evenly across the field, rather than being more common near the cottages by the northwestern corner of the field, and this may have been from manuring practices in the 19th century. Manure from horses in London streets was swept up and sold to farms as fertilizer; this probably included street detritus such as broken pottery and clay pipe stems. Spreading the manure on a field could have resulted in the even distribution of finds seen in Latimer Field.

In 2019 a magnetometry and resistance survey was performed in the south-east quadrant, in preparation for a planned excavation of the site. The survey identified located both the inner and outer ditches, and a linear feature that was considered to be the remains of a palisade that ran between the two circuits. As with the 2007 survey of the north-east quadrant, multiple possible pits were identified. These were more frequent in the southern part of the survey area. The survey was limited by the presence of a metal fence which caused magnetic interference, and by the dry soil, which reduced the sensitivity of the resistance measurements. The results were used to select an area for excavation, and a more detailed resistance study was conducted on the area of the planned trench, without finding new features.

The site was excavated in 2019 by a team led by Carter. The main goals of the excavation were to prove that Freston was a causewayed enclosure, and to obtain material that could be used for radiocarbon dating. Since causewayed enclosures often have high densities of deposits at the ends of their ditches, the area of excavation was chosen to overlap a causeway in Latimer Field, so that the trench exposed the adjacent ditch termini for both the inner and outer circuit of ditches.Carter et al. (2021), pp. 122-123.

Notes

References

Sources

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* Healy, Frances; Bayliss, Alex; Whittle, Alasdair; Pryor, Francis; French, Charles; Allen, Michael J.; Evans, Christopher; Edmonds, Mark; Meadows, John; Hey, Gill (2015) 011 "Eastern England". In Whittle, Alasdair; Healy, Frances; Bayliss, Alex (eds.). Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of Southern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow. pp. 263–347. .
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* Martingell, Hazel. (June 2011). "The worked flint report". In
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* {{Cite journal , last=Wilson , first=D. R. , date=1975 , title='Causewayed camps' and 'interrupted ditch systems' , url= , journal=Antiquity , volume=49 , issue= 195, pages=178–186 , doi=10.1017/S0003598X00070046 , ref=none

Causewayed enclosures
Interrupted ditch system at Potash Farm
Babergh District