Cottam B: an Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement in East Yorkshire

Excavation of the Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian settlement at Burrow House Farm, Cottam, East Yorkshire from 1993-95 was one of the first excavations undertaken of a “productive site”, so-called because of the large quantities of early medieval metalwork produced by metal detecting. It also provided an important demonstration of the effects of the re-organisation of land ownership following the Scandinavian settlement of Northumbria. Excavation demonstrated that the abandonment of an Anglo-Saxon “Butterwick” type enclosure in the late 9th century was closely followed by the construction of the new Anglo-Scandinavian farmstead some 100m to the north, reinforcing a trend seen in the horizontal stratigraphy of dated metalwork derived from metal-detecting. The excavation and associated fieldwork were published in the Archaeological Journal 156 (1999), and via an experiment in e-publication in Internet Archaeology 10 doi:10.11141/ia.10.4. The associated digital archive is available from the ADS as doi:10.5284/1000339, and includes the database of metal-detected finds as then known.

However, metal-detecting has continued at the site, almost doubling the quantity of artefacts. This has allowed refinement of the interpretation of the chronological and spatial development of the settlement, as well as to some significant refinements in artefact chronology. In keeping with the tradition of e-publication of the project, the new distributions have been published in Internet Archaeology 42 doi:10.11141/ia.42.3, and the revised finds database and new photographs of nearly all the early medieval non-ferrous finds have been deposited with ADS as this archive.