First farmers on the fen edge

Long before the city, farming families worked the gravel terraces where the Nene meets the Fens. Their pottery gave Peterborough’s name to a whole chapter of British prehistory.

c.3400 BCPeterborough Ware in use
1910Abbott publishes the Fengate pits
1970sFrancis Pryor excavates Fengate
c.2000 BCThe old woodland has largely gone

Explore in 3D · Peterborough Ware

A round-bottomed bowl

Rows of cord and fingertip marks, in the style named after Fengate.

Drag to turn · a simplified model, not a survey

Living on the fen edge

Fengate, on the east side of today’s city, sits on a low gravel terrace at the edge of the Fens. From the later Neolithic, people farmed here. Excavations by Francis Pryor in the 1970s found an early Neolithic house and a mortuary structure, part of a prehistoric landscape that changed how archaeologists understand early Britain.

A pot that named an era

In the early 1900s, gravel digging at Fengate turned up richly decorated pottery. The local antiquarian George Wyman Abbott collected it and published his finds in 1910. Archaeologists now call the style Peterborough Ware. Potters decorated it by pressing twisted cord, bird bones, sticks and fingernails into the wet clay, and it has since been found across England.

Clearing the wildwood

Over roughly a thousand years the woodland around Fengate was cleared, and by about 2000 BC it had probably gone. Soon afterwards the land was divided into fields. Life was not always peaceful: one Neolithic burial at Fengate was found with a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead between the ribs.

Timeline

c.4000 BCFarming and new kinds of pottery take hold in Britain.
c.3400–2800 BCPeterborough Ware is made and used across southern Britain.
c.3000 BCCommunities use the lower Nene landscape around Fengate and the fen edge.
c.2000 BCThe woodland is largely cleared; fields follow.
1910George Wyman Abbott publishes the prehistoric pits at Peterborough.
1970sFrancis Pryor’s excavations ahead of the new town.