A routine highway upgrade has become a major dig after builders cutting the new Europa Way relief road—a two-kilometre bypass on the outskirts of Ipswich, about 110 kilometres northeast of London—hit the remains of a Late Bronze-Age settlement dated to around 1200 BCE.

Fieldwork conducted by Oxford Archaeology and Cotswold Archaeology for Suffolk County Council exposed the post-holes of two timber roundhouses, twin ring-gullies and at least four grain stores on a gravel terrace above the River Gipping. The same trenches produced 18 cremation urns whose charcoal residues have yielded radiocarbon dates consistent with the settlement’s occupation. A summary of the excavations appears on the council’s Heritage Explorer blog.

“The closeness of the cemetery to domestic space shows families were burying their dead virtually on the doorstep,” senior project manager Chris Thatcher told the BBC. “It is crucial evidence for how communities organised life—and death—along the Gipping valley in the Late Bronze Age.”

Among the artefacts are Deverel-Rimbury pottery, clay loom weights, a spindle whorl, a copper-alloy dress pin and a rare flint quern used for grinding grain—an uncommon find in eastern England. Residual sherds from earlier Neolithic activity and an Iron-Age gold coin in overlying layers point to millennia of sporadic reuse.

Councillor Philip Faircloth-Mutton, the county’s cabinet member for heritage, said the discovery “adds another layer to our understanding of what life was like for previous generations” and confirmed that all material will be conserved and archived by Suffolk’s Archaeological Service after soil and pollen studies are complete.

Work on the £2.1 million road is expected to resume later this summer once engineers agree protective measures for the subsurface remains—a reminder that even modest infrastructure projects can unearth windows onto Britain’s deep past.

The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.