People who occupied this increasingly damp fenland landscape during the earliest part of the neolithic period ('New Stone Age', 4500 to 2000 BC) shared a hunting, fishing and gathering lifestyle similar to that of the preceeding mesolithic period, or Middle Stone Age.

 

Throughout the neolithic period, however, great changes were to take place. With it came the first evidence of farming - cultivating crops and rearing herds of animals - and of pottery-making. Peterborough and the Fengate area lend their name to distinctive types of neolithic pottery, which are found widely across England.

 

Excavations in the Fengate area during the 1970s revealed that in the second millennium BC the fen edge was divided up by a network of ditches and hedged banks into droves and small fields or enclosures, among which stood the occasional isolated round building. The enclosure and drove system, which led down from dry ground to the ever wetter fen, was maintained throughout the Bronze Age (2000 to 800 BC), and was probably designed to manage animal herds - specifically flocks of sheep - grazing on the lush fen margins.