Prepared and maintained by Cambridge Development Archaeologyfor development teams working across Cambridge and Cambridgeshire.
Sources, review dates and corrections →Why it belongs in the appraisal
Archaeology affects developable area, enabling cost and start on site. Those are appraisal inputs. Identified early, the risk is a costed assumption that can be negotiated, insured against in the deal structure, or conditioned. Identified late, it becomes a programme problem with no commercial lever attached.
An unquantified risk also gets priced pessimistically by whichever party is left carrying it, which usually means you.
What can be checked before committing
A desk-based review will not tell you exactly what is buried, but it will tell you how likely substantial remains are and roughly what scale of requirement to expect.
- Historic Environment Record entries on and around the site, including previous fieldwork results
- Designated assets: scheduled monuments, listed buildings, conservation areas and registered landscapes within the setting
- Historic mapping and aerial photography, including cropmark evidence
- LiDAR and geological data — terrace gravels, fen edge and chalkland each carry distinct expectations
- The local plan's heritage policies and any allocation-specific archaeological requirements
- Whether the local authority has already indicated a pre-determination evaluation requirement on the site or its neighbours
Cambridgeshire specifics
Cambridgeshire's landscape is unusually productive archaeologically. Prehistoric and Romano-British settlement on the gravel terraces, extensive fen-edge activity with waterlogged preservation in places, and medieval settlement across the claylands mean that large greenfield sites here rarely come back entirely negative.
Waterlogged deposits deserve particular attention in appraisal: they preserve organic material, are correspondingly significant, and are considerably more expensive to excavate and analyse than dry-land features.
Carrying the finding into the deal
The output of a pre-acquisition review should be usable commercially, not just technically. That means a stated expectation of the likely archaeological requirement, an indicative cost range with the assumptions behind it, the programme implication for start on site, and a view on whether pre-determination evaluation is likely to be required.
With that in hand, archaeology is a line in the appraisal. Without it, it is an unfunded surprise sitting somewhere in the enabling works budget.