On Track

High Speed 1 (HS1) is the first new railway to be built in Britain for over a century and is the UKs first high speed railway. The publication of this volume celebrates the immense scale and award-winning quality of the archaeological and historic building investigations that resulted from the construction of Section 1 of the rail link in Kent.

The project encompasses some truly exceptional individual discoveries, such as the Early Neolithic longhouse at White Horse Stone, one of only a handful known in Britain and the most thoroughly dated example. Extensive excavations at Thurnham Roman Villa and Pepper Hill Roman cemetery have contributed greatly to our understanding of Roman Kent, while the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries at Cuxton and Saltwood Tunnel are immensely important additions to the corpus of Kentish cemetaries. Perhaps the most important contribution of HS1 Section 1 lies in the extent to which a range of ‘ordinary’ rural sites have been exposed and investigated across a broad range of landscape zones. The sheer number and scale of sites studied within a consistent research framework has offered a unique opportunity to examine change and continuity in this long-inhabited corridor from the Thames Estuary to the Channel coast.

This book provides a synthetic overview and critical analysis of the HS1 Section 1 archaeological results by a group of leading regional and period experts, placing the investigations within the context of current frameworks of archaeological understanding at a regional, national and international scale.