The Legacy

A local legacy of the 2015 excavation is a much better understanding of Thame’s past.

There had been chance finds over the years, Roman coins, a Roman cremation urn, pieces of Neolithic pottery, and the Belgic pot found by the badger, to name a few. It was obvious Thame had a long past. Now we can put that past into some form of context.

Site F was a large area to excavate, but it was only a small part of Thame itself. What else is waiting to be found?

We know that prehistoric people occupied high ground overlooking running water, at Site F and at Church Farm. There is evidence that in the Bronze Age, someone was buried beneath the Cornmarket. Lidar images show a network of prehistoric field boundaries and trackways in the landscape around Thame.

There is still much that remains a mystery, but we now know a lot more than we did about what life was like at Thame in ancient times.

The national legacy of Site F revolves around the causewayed enclosure, and the DNA evidence.

While there is much we don’t know, one thing we have learnt more about is the way causewayed enclosures were distributed across the landscape. There was a string of them along the Thames Valley and now we have one upstream along a tributary of the Thames, and a large one at that.

There is also some indication that Thame’s causewayed enclosure had links with a cluster of them in East Anglia.

Another type of earthwork enclosure is a henge. For a time, the archaeologists thought they had discovered a henge inside Thame’s causewayed enclosure. It turned out it wasn’t a henge, but too late, since the Council had already named the streets on Thame Meadows and named one of them “Henge Close”.

There is another legacy for the people of Thame. The Planning System delivered for us. It made the archaeology happen and it unlocked the past. Archaeologist Chris Ellis, who led the dig, has given several packed-out talks in Thame, one a sold-out event in Thame Players Theatre. Thame’s prehistoric past is now embedded in our collective consciousness.

Thank you to Chris Ellis and Thank you to Bloor Homes.