Abstract
THE importance of intensive exploration of the Fens, which led to the formation of the Fenland Research Committee at Cambridge, under the presidency of Prof. A. C. Seward, has already been referred to in these columns. Some of the results already obtained are now on exhibition at the British Museum, Bloomsbury, at the head of tho main staircase. The sites selected are mostly between March and Mildenhall, and moro or less connected with the Ouse, Cam and Bedford Rivers, where tho post-glacial period is represented by peat, clay and silt, in which a sequence of human occupations can be traced, while light is further thrown on land movement and forest development. Waterways and promising sites have been traced by surveying on the ground and from the air, and an interesting feature is the occupation in Roman times of what used to be river banks but arc now parallel mounds flanking slight depressions, in which shrunken rivers originally flowed. The contraction of the peat has left these banks in relief, and the amount of this wastage is indicated by the Holme post, which proves that Whittlesea Mere is about 11 ft. lower than in 1848. The co-operation of workers in many fields has been secured, and much attention given to the botany, geology and zoology of the region, which is linked to North Germany and Scandinavia by its foraminifera and tree-pollen, to say nothing of changes m relation to sea-level. The work supervised by Dr. Grahame Clark in association with Mr. C. W. Phillips and Major Fowler has been rendered more difficult by the presence of water in the deeper cuttings; but funds have been provided, mainly by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund, and the present exhibition, which will be open at least two months, will reveal to a larger public the potentialities of the Fens as a field of research in various branches of Science.
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Excavations in the Fens. Nature 136, 213–214 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136213b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136213b0