Monument record TR 13 NE 214 - Early / Mid Bronze Age funerary landscape, Saltwood

Excavations carried out between 1998-2001 at the Saltwood Tunnel and Stone Farm Bridleway sites, by Canterbury Archaeology Trust and Wessex Archaeology, as part of the CTRL works.

An Early / Mid Bronze Age funerary landscape and possible associated settlement and agricultural activity.

5 Early Bronze Age ring-ditches which suggest the denuded remains of round-barrows. 3 were annular, 1 probably originally penannular, 1 was not fully revealed by the excavation. The penannular ditch may have initially been a mortuary enclosure rather than a barrow. 4 are equally spaced c.170m apart (centre-to-centre) in a roughly E-W alignment, with the fifth spaced only 75m to the east of its neighbour. They range in diameter from 15.8m to 42.5m. Only one of the barrows contained a burial - a centrally-placed crouched burial. A further crouched inhumation was located equidistant between the western-most two barrows. Non-funary evidence consists of a single pottery-filled pit, and a N-S aligned ditch with aligns with the eastern-most barrow is tentatively assigned to this phase (though as at leat three of the barrows must have remained prominent features in the landscape into the Saxon period due to the Saxon cemeteries that formed around them (TR 13 NE 223), this assumption seems ill-formed). (1)

Additional bibliography. (2-4)

<1> Wessex Archaeology, 2002, Saltwood Tunnel Post Excavation Assessment Report (Unpublished document). SKE16613.

<2> Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 1999, North of Saltwood Tunnel Kent (Unpublished document). SKE6883.

<3> Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 1999, North of Saltwood Tunnel, Kent. Detailed Archaeological Works Interim Report (Unpublished document). SKE6873.

<4> Oxford Wessex Archaeology Joint Venture, 2006, The prehistoric, Roman and Anglo-Saxon funerary landscape at Saltwood Tunnel, Kent (Unpublished document). SKE16617.