ARCHAEOLOGISTS have made the stunning discovery of a 5,500-year-old Stone Age village, home to Derbyshire's first farmers and potters.
Ben Johnson and his team made the ancient find during a painstaking dig in Peak District fields, near Wirksworth.
He said he was astonished when he discovered the first evidence – a shattered shard of pottery dating back to at least 3,500BC.
Ben said: "I pulled the piece of Stone Age pottery out of the ground and felt a sense of excitement and wonder. No-one had held that for more than 5,000 years."
The team spent weeks digging at the location after being drafted in to check the area by Longcliffe Quarries which will build a new headquarters on the site.
Finds such as pottery, tools and an ancient barley grain have been removed.
Ben, an archaeologist for 15 years, said: "You still get excited when you find something like this."
The finds came from the Neolithic period, when people settled for the first time instead of living by hunting and gathering.
Experts claimed that the find was "regionally significant".
When the Stone Age site at Curzon Lodge was last seen, Derbyshire was almost completely covered in forest and its population wore animal skins.
But now it has been uncovered by archaeologists who say it is an exciting piece of the county's historical puzzle.
Nestled in the hills near Wirksworth, Ben Johnson said he felt a sense of "excitement and wonder" as he found an ancient rubbish dump followed by hearths, and holes for posts thought to be part of Neolithic, or late Stone Age, homes.
Like so many of today's archaeological discoveries, the dig began when a company – in this case Longcliffe Quarries – began the process of applying for a new building.
The firm was required by law to get Mr Johnson's company, Archaeological Research Services (ARS), to investigate the proposed site, near Brassington.
Mr Johnson, 34, said he was felt a sense of wonder as he worked painstakingly to excavate the first discovery – a Stone Age midden, or rubbish dump.
He said: "Even after 15 years in the job I was excited. A digger took away the top soil and revealed charcoal and the kind of dark earth you would get if you threw away your vegetables and left them in the ground for thousands of years.
"From what I'd seen before, I realised this was probably a Neolithic site and almost straightaway thought this could be evidence of a settlement.
"You want to see what's there but you have to be painstaking – I worked with a hand trowel."
Mr Johnson, operations manager for the site, said the midden contained a piece of pottery, small pieces of flint, chipped into sharp tools and, perhaps most importantly, an ancient barley grain.
He said: "The grain had been through the process of being grown and threshed.
"Even though it was a small thing it had a very important meaning. It showed we were looking at the earliest farmers in the Peak District."
The pottery came from the early Neolithic Period, when people in England began to settle for the first time instead of living by hunting and gathering.
Prior to this time, people would not have made pottery as it is not portable. Mr Johnson said: "The shard dated from between 3,900BC and 3,500BC. This is pretty fragile stuff. Any ploughing nearby would destroy it, so it was a rare find. It was exciting because I knew I was the first person to hold the pottery since it was thrown in there thousands of years ago."
Once the discovery was made, Bakewell-based ARS wrote a report on the finds for the planning authority, Derbyshire Dales District Council.
As a condition of planning permission for Longcliffe's new head office and transport depot, the authority said ARS should have a closer look at the site.
In total, 83 pits and 13 trenches were dug as they searched for more remains, and a clearer picture of the site's importance developed.
Hearth pits, used for cooking and warmth, were found containing charcoal which could be accurately carbon-dated to the Neolithic Period. Several more small pieces of flint cut into sharp knives for things like skinning animals and butchery were discovered.
And three possible "post-holes" suspected to be part of a home's structure was found.
Jim Brightman, a 29-year-old senior archaeologist with ARS, was involved with assessing the finds.
He said a picture emerged of a small settlement which he was able to describe drawing on knowledge of others in Derbyshire and the UK.
He said: "Our best guess was that we were looking at a settlement of buildings built using posts. These homes may have been quite sturdy or they may have been more lightweight. They were probably rectangular like others in the area.
"People would have lived inside them. Hearths would have been either inside or outside the buildings.
"There would have been middens, perhaps a short distance away from the settlements, just as with rubbish dumps today."
The farming, he said, would have been in small plots, "more horticulture than agriculture" making families self-sufficient. He added: "There could well have been cattle because that is a mobile type of farming.
"Most of the country would have been covered with forest but people were beginning to clear the trees to keep cattle."
Mr Brightman said the site also provided more information about other finds made in the area, including several Neolithic flint axes, nine inches long, cut to a sharp point. He said: "They could quite possibly have been used on the site.
"It's still not known for certain whether they would have been prestige items, owned for the sake of being owned. But I think they would have been used because they are such useful tools."
Perhaps surprisingly, ARS did not object to Longcliffe Quarries' plans. But Mr Brightman explained that, once dug up, the site was "destroyed anyway".
Its importance, he said, was in the information gained from it rather than material finds from the trenches.
Curzon Lodge's Neolithic settlement, he said, formed another important piece of the Neolithic puzzle in Derbyshire's uplands.
Mr Brightman said: "The remains at Curzon Lodge are important but not unique. They are of local and probably regional significance but not national.
"The first important thing about it is that it was what we had come to expect of this kind of site – more proof of what we suspect to be the case and an important body of data.
"But it also fixes a point in the landscape around Brassington where we can say this is what was happening. It brings greater understanding of the area."
Mr Brightman said the opportunity to dig new sites often came because of developments.
He said: "It's a good thing this happens because it means we have the resources to see what's there. The developers pay for the work."
The digs were made in summer 2008 and winter 2009, but this is the first time details of the Curzon Lodge finds have been revealed to the general public.
Author: C. Mallett | Source: This is Derbyshire [January 11, 2011]