Duttons Farm Iron Age and Roman period site, Lathom

The archaeological site at Duttons Farm, Lathom has so far been excavated over four seasons by Liverpool Museum who run a four week training excavation on the site for full and part-time students from Liverpool University and local colleges. The site is the only one of its type in Lancashire.

One of these was backfilled with tile, blocks of stone, pottery and quernstone fragments (for grinding corn). It is possible that this means that close-by is the Roman period house that we are still looking for. The materials in the trackway suggest that it may be a different type of building from the earlier roundhouses, which had been in use for generations of native Iron Age families,as their descendants adopted a more Romanised lifestyle.

There is also evidence that there was a reorganisation of this Roman period agricultural landscape some time later and probably before the medieval period (ie. before c. 1400 AD) as fields were laid out over the earlier trackways. Although more evidence is needed, it is possible that this could represent activity belonging to one of the least well understood periods of British archaeology, that between c. 400-1100 AD, when first English (ie. Germanic) and later Scandinavian incomers arrived in the area.

Medieval
Additionally, we have located, but not yet investigated, a number of sites
of the medieval period, 1100-1400 AD. This will be of relevance to our
understanding of the adjacent Lathom Hall and park, which is first
documented as rising to prominence during this period.

Roman
A trackway, open in the Roman period, during the 2nd or 3rd century AD, then may have put the settlement out of use as it became part of a field system associated with a new farmstead, which has yet to be located. It is probably part of a web of trackways, associated with the fields of the Roman farming estate, that have been located about 80 metres to the west of the Iron Age settlement.

Prehistoric
Traces of prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement dating to c. 5-6000 years
ago have been located, but not investigated in detail yet. These probably
represent a series of small temporary camps for mobile groups using the surrounding woodland and wetlands that were extensive in this period,as well as the adjacent river and perhaps uplands to hunt and collect wild
plants.

Iron Age
The earliest part of the excavated site belongs to a late Iron Age farmstead of c.100 BC, although it is known that an earlier farm exists in the vicinity. So far, four roundhouses have been found, one of them going out of use in the Roman period c.100-200 AD, showing many centuries of activity on essentially the same location. Grain storage buildings and pits, which would have been used for storage and rubbish disposal, have been found around the houses. A ditched boundary also runs close to the houses but it is not clear yet if this represents a field boundary or a ditch surrounding the buildings and separating them from their adjacent cleared arable and pasture land.