The excavations at Mucking are famous in the history of British archaeology. The fieldwork, undertaken between 1965 and 1978 on a gravel terrace perched above the marshes of the northern shore of the Thames estuary in Essex, was pioneering both for the scale of work—hitherto rarely seen—and for its aspiration to hand-excavate all archaeological features. In the event, about 75 per cent of features were fully investigated, although some parts of the site received only cursory examination as fieldwork failed to keep pace with the encroachment of a gravel quarry. As far greater proportions of features were excavated than would be the case with a commercial archaeological project today (where the sampling fraction for ditches rarely exceeds ten per cent and is often much less), the work led to the recovery of artefact assemblages of considerable size (140000 sherds of pottery for instance). Such quantities of material culture posed inevitable logistical challenges for the post-excavation programme, and reporting on Mucking, as with so many major excavations of the 1960s–1980s, proved difficult to complete and had largely stalled when the present authors picked up the project afresh in 2007. Until now only a site atlas and the Anglo-Saxon evidence had been published, but this volume, and its companion on the prehistoric evidence (reviewed in Antiquity 355, Gosden Reference Gosden2017), now complete the series. This report is an excellent achievement that displays considerable insight and that successfully rehabilitates Mucking into the recently reinvigorated field of Romano-British rural archaeology.

The scale of the investigations makes it possible to appreciate the relationships between an extensive rural farmstead, five associated small cemeteries and a series of pottery kilns. Pottery production seems to have been a facet of the late Iron Age settlement, and activity continued unbroken into the Roman period. Copies of Claudian bronze coins suggest that the Mucking site was engaged in some manner of economic contact with the Roman state in the decades immediately following the conquest in AD 43, perhaps via the supply of agricultural produce, or salt manufactured on the coastal marshes. Significant restructuring of the site's layout occurred in the closing decades of the first century AD, and seems to go hand in hand with a reorganisation and intensification of pottery production. The new site layout included a timber granary and a rectangular structure with an apsidal end set within a large rectangular enclosure. Such apsidal structures have been found on a small number of other sites in Essex, and it is not always apparent whether they were roofed buildings or open enclosures, or what function(s) they performed (the apsidal end has encouraged some to consider a religious interpretation, although on very little hard evidence). While the Mucking structure does look like a roofed building (the authors suggest that its walls may have been built from cob), another example from Monument Borrow Pit near Rochford was clearly an open enclosure as it was defined by 2m-wide ditches; some were seemingly buildings and others were enclosures. A residential function is suggested at Mucking and, if the large quantity of artefacts contained in the backfill of a nearby well were derived from this building, the residents were of some status.

Occupation at Mucking continued until the mid to later third century AD; from the mid second to the third quarter of the third century, the kilns formed part of the South-Eastern Reduced Ware industry that supplied pottery to the military garrisons of northern Britain, doubtless distributed by ship up the east coast. The pottery probably formed a small fraction of cargos dominated by foodstuffs and perhaps salt (salterns have been excavated recently within 2km of Mucking at Stanford Wharf). It is unfortunate that the biological record from Mucking is so poor; we can reconstruct little of its agricultural base due to the poor survival of animal bone, and also because few of the bulk samples collected were processed for the recovery of plant macrofossils (the soil samples are still retained by the British Museum, so in theory they could yet be analysed). It may be telling that significant occupation at Mucking came to an end at around the same time that South-Eastern Reduced Wares ceased to be supplied to the northern frontier, where the garrisons switched to more local suppliers. Conceivably it was the loss of the northern military market that led to the virtual abandonment of the farmstead after centuries of occupation.

An aspect of this report that will probably be much discussed relates to the presence of fourth-century AD Roman pottery in the upper fills of some ditches and the backfills of Anglo-Saxon Grubenhäuser in association with coarsewares in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Very little other fourth-century activity has been found on the site, and the question arises of whether certain elements of the late Roman ceramic repertoire were used by inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon settlement alongside Germanic-inspired wares. If so, and issues of residuality cloud the matter, it invites discussion of the start date of the Grubenhäuser settlement at Mucking. While a date around the middle of the fifth century was favoured previously, a reappraisal of the cemetery evidence suggests that some burials could date to the early to mid fifth century. It is widely, although by no means universally, believed that Roman pottery ceased to be produced or to circulate to any degree within a decade or so of AD 400 in Britain. If the earlier to mid fifth-century date is upheld for the start of the Anglo-Saxon settlement, this implies continued production and circulation of some categories of Roman pottery rather later than has hitherto been commonly thought. An alternative interpretation, and the one favoured on balance by the authors, is that the Anglo-Saxon occupation actually started in the late fourth century when Roman pottery would have been more plentiful, which carries with it wider implications about the context of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settlement. The Mucking evidence makes an important contribution to the renewed debate concerning how long Roman pottery production continued into the fifth century, and will surely be widely discussed and critiqued in this context.

This volume ably demonstrates the value of not giving up on important excavations that have remained unpublished for decades. While such investigations inevitably show their age in certain respects, most commonly in the approaches to environmental archaeology, reports such as this demonstrate that important evidence endures and deserves to be properly disseminated and debated. The authors have done us a great service by bringing this final volume on the excavations at Mucking to such an excellent conclusion.