A Millennium of Saltmaking: Prehistoric and Romano-British Salt Production in the Fenland

Description

Lincolnshire Archaeology & Heritage Reports Series No. 4

The fenland of south Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and west Norfolk, with its low rainfall and drying winds, was an ideal area for the collection of sea salt by evaporation; an industry that first appears in the last years of the Bronze Age and continued into the Middle Ages with few changes in technology.

This volume describes the results of substantial excavations at Cowbit and Morton in Lincolnshire, and Middleton in Norfolk (undertaken as part of the Fenland Management Programme), together with smaller-scale work at Langtoft, Market Deeping, Deeping St James, and the Bourne-Morton Canal in Lincolnshire, Parson Drove in Cambridgeshire, and Nordelph and Downham West in Norfolk. It assesses the data recovered against the wider saltern industry defined by the Fenland Survey of 1982-89 (published in East Anglian Archaeology Reports) and defines the salt-making industry of the Fens from the late Iron Age to the late Roman period and beyond.