10 PREHISTORIC NOTES 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Figure 3
PREHISTORIC NOTES 11 ularly Brixworth, Spratton, and Church and Chapel Brampton. These last three parishes have been surveyed <strong>for</strong> ridge and furrow and premedieval sites. At a casual sighting the area is not particularly rich; at Brixworth <strong>for</strong> instance there were known to be two RB sites and three early Saxon cemeteries, all found by ironstone quarrying (c.1870 -c.1960), and no new sites were found. In Northampton Museum there are Neolithic and Bronze Age urns collected in the late C19 from Brixworth, unprovenanced but almost certainly discovered by the quarrying activities. Aerial photographs showed the area to be rich in cropmarks, especially the Bramptons, where there are recognisable village complexes with roads and abutting houses and enclosures. It there<strong>for</strong>e seemed worthwhile to make a much more thorough examination of these parishes, especially in areas of known cropmarks. Fields were walked in strips of about 10 yards width; where there was a concentration of flints careful searches were made, so that about an hour was spent on each acre. A site at Overstone (OVI) was first studied in a field revealing linear crop marks and two ring ditches. In one area consisting of about an acre there was a remarkable concentration of flint tools, worked flakes, and pieces of core etc. Some of the more interesting ones are illustrated on the figure 3. It was remarkable that as soon as the main area was left the number of flints discoverable fell to near zero. Similarly a site with a ring ditch cropmark at Chapel Brampton (CB5) yielded a good collection of flints from a limited area. A programme of very careful searching of all the lightsoil fields has now begun. Most of them produce at least a few flints, especially microliths, suggesting quite extensive early agriculture. Many new concentrations of flints, undoubtedly representing occupation sites, have been found in fields not yet known to reveal cropmarks. Similar searches of clayland fields have failed to find any flint concentrations. An analysis of some of the collections is given below. The collections of flints in the table will be biased towards the numbers of well-defined and easily-recognisable tools. Unworked flakes in plough soil are apt to be meaningless because it is impossible to tell if they originate from a working site, or are produced by the action of weather and machinery. Figure 3 illustrates some of the flints from a few of the sites. No detailed measurement analysis has been attempted to obtain histograms of axial ratios etc, but from the very characteristic barbed-and-tanged arrowheads and round finely worked scrapers it seems clear that most of the groups are Bronze Age. Figure 3 Overstone 1 - 3 Scrapers 4, 5 Typical blades Chapel Brampton 6 Scraper from a ring ditch site Brixworth Upper Park 7, 8 Tanged and barbed arrowheads, bifacially flaked 9 Probably part of a tanged arrowhead bifacially flaked 10, 11 Samples of the many microliths from this site. 12 - 16 Various scrapers Lynch Field 17, 18 Two fine tanged and barbed arrowheads, bifacially flaked Brittlewell 19 A blade First Scottie 20,21 Scrapers Footway 22 Scraper Spratton Big Slade 23 Barbed and tanged arrowhead 24, 25 Scrapers Paston, near Peterborough 26 Unusually blunt barbed and tanged arrowhead, bifacially flaked, from a ring ditch site in the far E of the county. Provisional conclusions from this work are that Bronze Age occupation sites in central Northamptonshire are limited to light soils, easily utilised by primitive agriculture. At the same time the remaining land was quite familiar, even if it was substantially the much-written-about impossible-to-find primeval <strong>for</strong>est, <strong>for</strong> worked flints are found in small quantities Site Total Arrowheads Scrapers Tanged Tanged and barbed Overstone (0V1) 92 0 0 13 Brixworth Upper Park 241 2 2 36 Spratton Big Slade 102 0 1 29 Blades Microliths Utilized Cores Others flakes 14 0 14 7 44 66 65 23 0 47 24 4 7 6 22