Environmental Archaeol 5

Botanical and faunal remains from a third-fourth-century RB farm indicate a predominantly arable farming system. Agrarian innovation is evinced by exceptionally large cattle bones - possibly representing imported animals used as powerful tractors for the heavy clay soil. The farmhouse was a vernacular timber building exhibiting no particular signs of affluence. However, the biological evidence for economy, diet and lifestyle indicates that the occupants were affluent people with the resources to consume imported plant foods and preserved fish and to pursue recreations including hunting and hawking (or something very like it).

Discoveries of Triticum dicoccum (emmer wheat) on two Middle Saxon settlements point to the re-introduction of this crop to Britain after the end of the Roman period. Radiocarbon determinations on charred glumes confirm the dating of the remains.