8,000-year-old lost city found, rewriting history

What began as routine infrastructure work for the A46 ring road expansion in Newark, Nottinghamshire, has led to one of the UK's most significant archaeological discoveries: an 8,000-year-old lost settlement.

Over 22 weeks, a team of 30 specialists excavated more than 23 acres, uncovering an uninterrupted human timeline stretching back to 6000 BC. The site yielded skeletal remains of seven individuals, potentially from the Iron Age, Roman, or Anglo-Saxon periods. Among the artifacts found were 163 fragments of glazed pottery, flint arrowheads, and Neolithic hand mills for processing grain, indicating prehistoric subsistence activities and social evolution.

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Our excavations have revealed fascinating data about life in this corner of Nottinghamshire during the prehistoric, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon periods, and even up to the present day.

Archaeologists were particularly struck by a "grubenhaus," an Anglo-Saxon sunken-floor building, which suggests Newark was a denser hub of activity than previously believed. The presence of Roman pottery and a Roman well further confirm the area's long history as a center for habitation and agriculture. The site also contains traces from the English Civil War (1642), reinforcing the theory of "persistent sites", locations with fertile soil and water access that attract cyclical human settlement over thousands of years.

Archaeologist Pese Salinas of AMS described the findings as revealing insights into the diet, lifestyle, and construction methods of past inhabitants, offering significant social and economic information. The discovery provides a unique window into the daily lives and development of the region across various historical periods.

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It tells us what kind of food they produced, how they lived, and how they built their houses; we can obtain a lot of social and economic information from it.