96 Archaeology 



(i) The Pagan Period. The evidence for this period in Cambridgeshire 

 is abundant. More than two dozen burial sites are known. Most of these 

 have produced a considerable number of graves (sometimes running into 

 hundreds), and most of the burials were accompanied by grave-goods. 

 There is therefore a very large collection of objects from these finds on 

 view in the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. 



The men were usually buried with their weapons and often with food 

 for the next world; while the women were dressed in woollen clothes 

 with numerous ornaments such as brooches on the breast, beads in long 

 festoons round the neck, girdle-hangers at the waist, and clasps at the 

 wrists. In some cemeteries (e.g. at Little Wilbraham) numerous cremation 

 burials have been found, but, on the whole, cremation seems to be the 

 exception rather than the rule in Cambridgeshire. Fig. 21 shows that the 

 cemeteries are confmed to the fen margins and to the river valleys. No 

 cemeteries have, as yet, been found on the Boulder Clay covered uplands. 

 This raises several points which are difficult to explain, for although the 

 clay areas were apparently devoid of pagan Saxon settlement, yet the 

 Domesday Survey shows them to be as densely occupied as the river 

 valleys (see Fig. 22). It is not clear whether this means that the uplands were 

 unpopulated in pagan times, or whether, perhaps, survivors of the Romano- 

 British population lived on them. Another phenomenon, as yet imex- 

 plained, is the scarcity of settlement along the River Ouse. Cemeteries are 

 so numerous in other Cambridgeshire valleys, and in those of the adjacent 

 parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, that one would have expected a similar 

 concentration along the Ouse. There are some burial sites along the river, 

 but they contain very few burials until Kempston is reached near Bedford. 



Only one village of the Pagan Age has as yet been explored in Cambridge- 

 shire. This is situated on the east bank of Car Dyke at Waterbeach, and its 

 rubbish overlay the silting of tliis Roman canal. The huts were of the same 

 semi-pit-dwelhng type that has been noticed elsewhere. A village of the 

 Viking Age at St Neots just outside the County had huts of similar form. 

 It has not been definitely estabhshed whether these pit-like hovels were 

 really the living rooms of the period, or whether they were undercrofts to 

 upper stories as indicated in the Bayeux Tapestry. 



Of the great linear earthworks of the County, the Devil's Dyke is one 

 of the most spectacular monuments of its kind in Britain,' while the Fleam 

 Dyke is httle less remarkable. Not much can be seen now of the Bran 



' The Devil's Dyke is 7^ miles long with a rampart 15 ft. high. It runs across the 

 open chalk country from the Fenland to the one-time wooded clayland, and has been 

 laid out in three straight sections, the north-westerly one of which was apparently 

 aligned on a Roman canal or lode which ran from Reach to Upware. 



