Christopher (2) Evans, Grahame Appleby, Sam Lucy.
Lives in Land: Mucking excavations by Margaret and Tom Jones, 1965-1978: prehistory, context and summary.
Oxbow. 2016
Mucking was a site like no other. Not only was this a matter of its size and ‘total archaeology’ excavation policy, but that the long-term intensity of its settlement sequence generated more than a million finds and 40,000 features, including some 1145 burials and 400 structures. Clearly relating to the site’s strategic location at the narrowing of the Thames Estuary, its sequence was unusually rich and full.
This volume is primarily concerned with Mucking’s prehistory and it presents a number of ‘extraordinaries’: eight round barrows, a Bronze Age fieldsystem, the concentric-circuit South Rings ringwork, more than 100 roundhouses and an unparalleled late Iron Age ceremonial complex involving square-barrows and huge-scale grain storage. Yet, as its subtitle announces, the book also overviews Mucking’s longer term sequence (i.e. Roman and Anglo-Saxon) and – drawing upon the wealth of the project’s archival sources – fully situates the fieldwork in its historiographical context.