Uncovering Prehistoric Funerary Remains on the Suffolk Coast

The Suffolk branch of our site team have recently completed a large (three-hectare) excavation at Walton, near the coastal town of Felixstowe in Suffolk. Their discoveries revealed that human activity in the area started at least 6,000 years ago, in the earliest Neolithic or ‘New Stone Age’, when they uncovered two large Neolithic pits with beautifully layered fills, bearing carinated bowls and Mildenhall Ware ceramics which date to that period.

On a promontory, with the land falling gently away to shallow valleys in the north and west, they found a funerary area providing evidence for thousands of years of cremation burial, from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age. Beaker people had dug three groups of pits here, and these were accompanied by six barrows, the largest 30m in diameter, which occupied the edges of the spur of land; one contained a central cremation burial within an upturned Early Bronze Age urn. There was also strong evidence for other settlement activity throughout the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, with Bronze Age field systems covering large parts of the site.

Excavations then revealed a cemetery group of 22 cremation burials and cremation-related deposits, dating to the latter end of the Iron Age, arranged in a semi-circle some 6.5m wide. None of the initial pits contained any intrinsically datable material, but while they held no urns some had been ‘burnt out’ prior to deposition of the cremations. This burning was sufficiently intense to fire the edges of the pits and a few centimeters into the surrounding soil, almost creating ‘in situ’ vessels for the remains.

At the centre of the group was a slightly larger, deeper, pit containing an intact vessel. The pot was upturned with a smooth, domed (unworked) stone placed on the base. The vessel is 35cm tall, with fingertip decoration around the shoulder and a pie-crust rim. It appears to be Early Bronze Age in date. We were keen to understand what the pot contained – it’s helpful to know what’s coming next, when you’re carefully digging a cremation vessel from the top down! So the Radiography Department at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds were contacted, and they agreed to CT scan the vessel to provide information on its contents prior to excavation in our lab.

The sequence within the pot appears relatively simple, with three bands of (presumably) pyre material tipped in from one side and large pieces of cremated bone placed on top. The pot was then filled with around 100 regular-sized pieces of flint gravel. These are not simply fill, as they are rammed deep under the lip of the pot to a good depth, both enclosing and sealing the cremated bone. With the stones in place, the pot was presumably lidded with cloth or skin and inverted in the pit. Another large stone, not dissimilar to that placed on the upturned base, had been placed under the rim.

To what extent is the placement of the stones deliberate? There are echoes of cairns and of stone piles found in barrow ditches; parallels where individuals bring and place stones during burials can be found in both ancient and modern contexts, although such a practice would be difficult to prove in an Early Bronze Age context. So there is much to consider during post-ex, where we’ll be analysing the human remains for any further information, and considering the context and wider meaning of the features, finds, and deposits.

Excavation work was conducted on behalf of Orion Heritage and Bloor Homes.