To browse Academia. Finchale keeps a third of Heppedun. Bertram eventually recovers the rest. Bishop, B. Pre-Construct Monograph 13, Pre-Construct Archaeology Limited undertook a programme of archaeological investigation ahead of the development of a site at Laurel Farm, Norfolk into an extension to Broadland Business Park.
The site is situated c. Following geophysical, fieldwalking and metal detecting surveys an archaeological evaluation investigated nearly trenches. Subsequent excavation concentrated on an area measuring m x m in the north-west of the site, with targeted trenches elsewhere.
The oldest artefact recovered was a Lower Palaeolithic handaxe, found by Neolithic people hundreds of thousands of years after its manufacture and carefully buried in a pit.
The earliest definite evidence for people actually visiting the site indicates that during the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities used the shelter provided by the roots of an upturned tree, possibly as a temporary camp, and while there manufactured flint blades. The use of tree-throw hollows occurs again in the Early Neolithic when an adjacent pair were used to dispose of quantities of pottery, animal bone and nearly 4, pieces of struck flint.
Analysis determined that this material had been middened before being carefully gathered up and dumped into the hollows. The first evidence for permanent habitation at Laurel Farm dates from the Middle Iron Age, when a farmstead composed of one or two roundhouses along with several refuse pits, was set within a field system.
