When the Saxton Road estate was being built in 1934, one of the largest Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Oxfordshire was found and excavated.
It had 119 burials and 82 cremations. Weapons, tools, jewellery and urns were found with some of the dead. It was used by settlers who came northern Europe to Britain after the end of Roman rule. A Bronze Age barrow was also found.
Abingdon New Cemetery in Spring Gardens occupies one of the highest points in Abingdon. Excavations, and finds made during grave-digging, show that this site was used in many periods: Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman and Saxon.
Important discoveries included the site of a rare Bronze Age timber circle, probably a ceremonial monument of some kind.
Bronze Age burials, part of an Iron Age village and a Roman well and fields were found in an excavation in 1974-76, before the Nuffield Way industrial estate was built. An unusual find was part of an early kind of plough, known as an ard, made of wood. This was preserved in a Roman well.
Between 1970 and 1973, rescue excavations were carried out by Abingdon’s Archaeological Society in gravel pits at Wilsham Road. Part of the area is now Abingdon Marina.
Discoveries included Bronze Age barrows, a Bronze Age farm, a Roman trackway and enclosure and early Anglo-Saxon buildings. These buildings may be linked to the large Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Saxton Road.
Three ‘ring ditches’, the sites of Bronze Age barrows (burial mounds) have been photographed from the air on Abingdon School’s playing fields on Faringdon Road.
They have not been excavated.