. fou nd in survive on archaeological sites. They may have been disturbed from earlier layers by digging through them, they may originally have been in soils that are constantly reworked, such as garden soils, or they may have been collected as curios. The archaeological principle of the terminus post quem (boundary after which) states that no deposit can be older than the date of the most recent object found in it. The date range of the material was surprising in many ways. The recent finds consisted of the sorts of things that might well be thrown away or lost in a garden and the older material also appeared to be domestic rubbish, It included post-medieval pottery, mainly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval pottery (including Hertfordshire grey wares of the late twelfth to mid fourteenth centuries, St Neots type wares of the late ninth to thirteenth centuries and possible Ipswich ware of the mid ninth to mid twelfth centuries) and some Iron Age and Romano-British pottery. There was also glass and metalwork, all of which appeared to recent. Discussion As neither of the test pits reached the bottom of the archaeological sequence, they did not provide a complete picture of past activity on the site. Indeed, the test pit at 15 Church Lane was dug entirely through the garden topsoil, which had reached a considerable depth at that location. This was probably a reflection of its position down a slope from the house. The other revealed a sequence of surfaces going back to perhaps the middle of the nineteenth century, still younger than the date of the cottage. Nevertheless, the discovery of a reasonable quantity of medieval pottery suggests that the core of the village, as documented on maps from the eighteenth century on, is located in the same general area as the core of the medieval village, probably going back to the time of the charter of 1007 and earlier. What is more curious is the presence of Romano-British and Iron Age pottery.
The finds A wide variety of finds was recovered from both test pits, both assemblages being very similar in composition. Whilst most of the finds were of very recent (principally twentieth-century) date, there was also material of much earlier date.
Other excavations in the village have also not yielded any evidence to answer this question. These two test pits are, I hope, just the start of a series of pitting across the parish. While we now know where the main focus of the medieval village lay, as a result of these two pits, it is not yet possible to work out where settlement focuses may have been in the early medieval period or prehistory.
Although many of the hilltops in the area of Letchworth Garden City are known to have been the sites of Iron Age and Roman settlements (as at Caslon Way, Archers Way, Fairfield Park, High Avenue, Lordship Lane and so on), none of the others is on the same site as a medieval village. What the test pits do not tell us is whether Norton developed directly from a Romano-British settlement in the centuries following the end of Roman rule in Britain or whether it was simply a coincidence that a new settlement of the eighth or ninth century happened to be founded on the site of one much older.
This is a phenomenon known as residuality, whereby finds much older than the layer they are
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