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.
Excavations in advance of building Abingdon Business Park found Iron Age houses and a Roman trackway and fields.
The Iron Age houses formed part of the same village as that found on Nuffield Way in the 1970s.
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.
Excavations in 1922 traced the foundations of the medieval abbey church and cloister, and part of its Saxon predecessor.
Many skeletons, probably mostly of monks, were also found, as well as Roman remains.
Excavations in 1972 to 1976, before the Daisy Bank housing esate was built, discovered an Iron Age enclosed farmstead, a Roman villa and Anglo-Saxon buildings and burials.
The Roman villa was probably the centre of a farming estate which extended as far as the River Thames.