There is a ‘baby-boomer’ generation of archaeologists who benefited from what, in hindsight, were golden years for practical excavation experience in the late 1960s and 1970s. Among these, the long-running fieldwork at Mucking held legendary and, indeed, notorious status. ‘Difficult’ would be a misleadingly mild term. The conditions on site, and the quantity and complexity of the gravel-cut features, posed colossal challenges in that pre-digital era. For all the horror stories that emanated from the project, which were, inevitably, gleefully embellished within the digging circuit, the completion of what we may call the first round of analysis and publication with volumes on the prehistoric and Roman-period archaeology makes one acutely aware of the enormous credit that is due for getting us to this point. Credit certainly to the directors, Margaret and Tom Jones, and to the supervisors and the diggers in the field. Credit also for the quality of archiving and research that has enabled successive scholars to produce detailed and thought-provoking reports from post-excavation analysis carried out over the past thirty years and more. Last but not least, credit to the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission – subsequently English Heritage – for tackling Mucking with the determination and financial commitment required to release these data from the forlorn backlog mausoleum.

No special pleading is required for regarding the early Anglo-Saxon settlement and cemetery evidence of the fifth to seventh centuries ad as the primary point of reference in terms of the importance of this site. This phase was the conclusion of a sequence spanning some 1,600 years from the Late Bronze Age, in which this raised gravel ridge beside a bend in the Thames Estuary, providing an unparalleled view eastwards to the sea, was intensely used by successive populations and their cultures. It is early Anglo-Saxon Mucking that is truly unique, and nationally a key site for our perception and understanding of the archaeological period it represents. The prehistoric evidence from Mucking includes remains from both the Mesolithic and the Neolithic; it is, however, the Late Bronze Age, with its North and South Ring ringworks, that first surpasses the ‘scattered usage and first allotment’ of earlier prehistory, housing what were probably redistribution centres — inter alia for locally produced salt — as well as consumer sites. The Iron Age (Early, Middle and Late) is profusely represented all along the ridge, especially on its westward side, with a large number of roundhouses and a marked concentration of post-built structures interpreted as granaries calculated to represent the storage of produce from 600 hectares of arable land: a greater amount than the immediate population should have required, and implying central collection for redistribution; perhaps even overseas trade.

The Roman period, from the first to third centuries ad, also saw several different types of building including roundhouses, aisled timber structures and masonry constructions interpretable as corn-dryers and a possible cookhouse. What particularly distinguishes this period, however, is the cluster of pottery kilns in which vessels, especially jars, were produced that were distributed across the province to its northern frontier along and around Hadrian’s Wall. The site in this period was focused upon a large rectangular enclosure of just over a hectare, with markedly few internal structures or features, but a deep well (11 metres) towards its centre that was ritually closed in the mid-third century with a massive assemblage of burnt pottery, building materials, metalwork – both jewellery and practical equipment – and glass. Altogether, this assemblage is judged appropriate for a high-status, probably official, homestead. There are also five discrete and varied burial grounds, and two other clusters of cremation burials, of the early to mid-Roman period.

A crucial question is whether the sequence of 1,600 years from the Late Bronze Age to the early Anglo-Saxon period is one of continuity or not. Whatever perspective one takes, and however local or broad a scale is examined, the late Roman/early Anglo-Saxon transition is constantly elusive. In the case of Mucking, tantalisingly, the question resolves itself into that of how we envisage and interpret the evidence of the mid-third to the early fifth centuries. Structurally, the late Roman period is represented by nothing more than a large, round depression explicitly referred to as ‘the Enigma’, but there are finds from throughout this period, especially coins and pottery. Coins represent every period of the Roman occupation of Britain from the reign of Claudius to Arcadius and the House of Theodosius (ad 388–402); Richard Reece notes, however, that the numbers found from the late third century onwards are surprisingly low, and he emphasises the similarity of the coin profile to military sites in the north and west, as well, it should be noted, as at the small town at Kelvedon, also in Essex. Up to ten types of pottery are identified by fabric that are datable within the period of the mid-third to the late fourth century, some types, Mayen Ware (seven sherds), Oxfordshire Parchment Ware (fifty-seven sherds) and Porchester D Ware (195 sherds), being exclusively late fourth-century. The distribution of these finds by feature is meticulously examined, emphasising how much of the material (along with later Roman coins) came from the fills of Anglo-Saxon-style Grubenhäuser at the southern end of the site. Similarly, the profile of this assemblage is carefully compared with other late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon sites – particularly Icklingham and West Stow, in Suffolk, and the Roman small town at Heybridge, on the Blackwater estuary in Essex – to argue that in certain respects it represents ‘normal domestic’ detritus rather than an unusually ‘curated’ assemblage selected for preservation by later occupants.

One rational hypothesis for the late Roman phase at Mucking was the presence of an unlocated and unidentified settlement centre, possibly a villa, close by, but outside the area of excavation. Logically, residual material associated with such a centre could be expected to appear in the fills of features of the next substantial phase, even if the primary contexts of that material remain unknown and plausibly lost. The easy attractiveness of this postulate is justly critiqued early in the Romano-British settlement and cemeteries volume, but it is not conclusively refuted. Certainly, the bolder and more exciting proposition, however, is that the southern Grubenhäuser are themselves the primary context of a mixed early Anglo-Saxon pottery (primarily faceted carinated bowls) and late Roman ceramic horizon, and that this combination of features and artefacts could define a true transitional phase, datable possibly as early as the late fourth century, certainly no later than the early fifth.

This is a challenging and radical proposition that necessarily demands a high level of proof. It is not clear to me that the data and arguments as yet amount quite to that: the observation made in a University of Leeds MPhil thesis of 1968, that the late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon pottery are in complementary rather than a homogenised distribution in the Grubenhäus fills is duly noted. The factor of abrasion is also duly noted, although a comprehensive up-to-date review, together with precise assessment of ratios of sherd size and weight against hardness of fabric, would be valuable. None of this is to question the fact that the proximity, even the contiguity, of what we call ‘Late Roman’ and what we call ‘Early Anglo-Saxon’ at Mucking means that here we are as close as we have ever been to uncovering the transition involving the end of Roman Britain and the start of Anglo-Saxon England, step by step. And yet, just exactly what was happening remains frustratingly elusive.

The completion of the series of reports on the epic excavations at Mucking is a beginning, not an end. The primarily prehistoric volume concludes with a chapter ‘Patterned ground/interim knowledges – sequence revisited and retrospect’, which presents one effective synthesis of the results, although – not least with the thirty-year span between the primary work on the Anglo-Saxon settlement and these concluding volumes – it must surely be the case that broadly based comparative debate on the results and their interpretations is fundamentally what the next stage of research requires. That style of discussion is indeed anticipated by the obliquely faceted sequences of reports, comments and reminiscences in the Lives in Land volume. The problem of the Roman/Anglo-Saxon transition is crucial, and part of the approach to it must be more precise work on chronology: the expressions ‘late fourth century’ and ‘early fifth century’ are frustratingly vague, as well as being almost comically interchangeable when the same phenomena are regarded from the viewpoint of late Roman or early Anglo-Saxon expertise, respectively. Up to and including the first quarter of the fifth century, radiocarbon dating can yield precision here, along with coin-dating and careful typological analysis. The collaborative approach thus also needs to take full cognizance of Continental, particularly French- and German-language scholarship on the archaeology of the Roman provinces in the north west in the period c ad 375–450. The true value of the work of all who have contributed to the elucidation of what was excavated at Mucking will ultimately be demonstrated by the degree to which succeeding generations of researchers continue to refine and to build upon their insights.